If We Can Copy and Paste Life—What Does It Mean?

I’ve taught quite a few people how to embed a video into a web page or blog as a means of creating compelling content for their social interactions online; in fact I’ve featured the process in webinars which drew upwards of 1000 attendees.

The process essentially is to copy and paste a block of “code” – a segment of computer instructions written in English – from a video hosting site like YouTube into the HTML panel for the destination page.

HTML is the coding language of the Internet and instructs the web browser what to display on screen when a web page loads. Once the code for the page includes the proper syntax for the “embed” tag that points to the video, that video will display when the page loads.

Here you can see a block of embed code from You Tube pasted into a post for Blogger, Google’s blogging program—in the HTML tab—so that it will display in the blog page as shown on the right.

Coincidentally a few weeks ago, Sixty Minutes did a segment in which they showed exactly the same process—used to revive extinct or endangered animals

Essentially the DNA of the endangered species is “copied and pasted” into the egg of a host animal that is similar in type. The only difference from the YouTube embed code is that DNA is made up only of combinations and syntaxes represented by the letters ACTG, not the entire English language.

As I’ve noted in the past, geneticists like Juan Enriquez, whose video I mentioned from TED, make no distinction between the way computer code operates and instructs, for example, a web browser, and how genetic code works with Life.

* * *

Here is the relevant portion of the article about the Sixty Minutes piece:

On the day we visited, they were laparoscopically removing eggs from an ordinary housecat, then sending the eggs down the hall to have the housecat DNA literally sucked out of them.

“What she’s doing is she’s removing the DNA from this domestic cat egg. And she can see it by what we call fluorescing it,” Dresser explained, while observing the procedure with Stahl. “It becomes just very blue, and so now she knows where it is. And now you’ll see her go in there and be able to remove it.”

Once the housecat DNA is deposited outside of the egg, they will replace it with the DNA of an endangered Arabian sandcat, a completely different species, gathered from a tiny piece of skin.

“And there you see it being inserted into the domestic cat egg,” Dresser explained.

“And you made that from just skin?” Stahl asked.

“Just from skin cells, right,” Dresser said.

An electrical impulse starts the egg dividing, and if all goes as planned, the now sandcat embryo will be put back into the domestic cat to grow to term.

* * *

Now, for most of us, copy and paste is a process we have used and understand.

So for those of us who use computers and the Internet every day, how do we react when see that the language of programming literally runs within Life?

For me, when I first encountered this fact, as a tech writer, it opened me up profoundly to a completely different view of life.

After all, programs on the Internet, Blogger, Google, YouTube, and on your desktop; for example Microsoft Word which I am using to write this, were created not my one person, but by enormous teams of programmers who planned, wrote, and implemented their code to achieve a specific set of purposes.

In reality, this code take electrical impulses, like the ones used to jump start the division of the egg of the Arabian sandcat inside its new host—but in the case of computer code it uses the electricity and silicon chips in the machine to manifest the ideas of the programmers—based on the interaction of the software with the end user.

In the case of Life, the interaction is much more complex because it involves the brain, and the entire cosmos or environment with which the “software” interacts. In his book The Biology of Belief rogue biologist Bruce Lipton identifies the cell membrane as the “computer chip” that literally processes the information from the environment—a process that forms the basis for the new science of epigenetics.

It also means we are not determined by our DNA code—genes express due to environmental, cognitive and other factors, but that the essential code itself—the combination A,C,T,G referenced chemicals that comprise the potential or blueprint for all living things—works like the code in your PC and responds to “user input.”

If I replace the embed code in the web page with a different set of symbols—I get a different video.

If I replace the DNA code of a house cat with that of an Arabian sandcat, that’s what I get.

In both cases the final outcome is an expression of a set of symbols—an idea in the mind of a set of programmers in the case of computers—and inevitably in the case of Life…

What?

Unlike some, I don’t see this as an argument for Intelligent Design or fundamentalism of any sort.

To me, the answer to this question, at this point is, I Don’t Know.

As I said, for me it is a powerful opening to the realization that life is far more than the merely random events that seem to happen through cause and effect, but rather that just as there is in your PC or laptop, there is an intelligent energy or software that is beneath or within the fabric of Life – or indeed is Life itself.

Certainly the recent advances in quantum physics and neuroscience also suggest, indeed they proclaim, that mental and subatomic phenomena are not simple cause and effect processes, but rather that the presence of an Observer or participant is fundamental to their nature.

So far, we have attributed the property of higher intelligence only to ourselves, and perhaps dolphins and whales, connecting it somehow only to our brains, which seem to host such mental activity exclusively.

And, we speculate about finding it on other planets or in other galaxies.

But if we understand that the same principles that we have come to know through our own experience with computers, the actual working of software—the ability to cut and paste symbolic representations to effect both electronic and natural expressions and manifestations—then it becomes clear that somehow a higher intelligence is at work in our cells.

For one thing, decoding the DNA within us has taken supercomputers to do the sequencing.

It is the expression of an immensely vast conglomeration of potentialities and variables—even for a one celled creature (some of whom have more genetic material within them than humans).

Moreover of the DNA already sequenced, a large portion is called “junk DNA”—but that’s because we don’t know what it does or expresses.

Some modern thinkers, like Eckhart Tolle, have said literally that a far higher intelligence than our own runs our digestive system, nervous system, respiration, and so on.

Conventional scientists will argue that DNA “evolved” as life formed billions of years ago from organic molecules.

It is clear that the mutation and changes in DNA, over millions of years, have produced many different species, most of them extinct.

But if DNA is software ask yourself this: could software “evolve” out of an “uninspired” organic molecule—or is the notion of manifesting an idea through a set of coded instructions a function of consciousness of some kind?

In other words, a mind – a term much of science finds extremely inconvenient—because a mind is not mere processing—but the capacity to conceive and manifest an intentional idea through mental activity.

How do we know that mind exists in nature, even if science finds the concept problematic? Because we experience it each moment we’re alive.

And now that we have created software (in our image), and have found it in nature and within ourselves we might say that consciousness is the intelligent energy behind the software of Life.

The Ultimate Absurdity of Personhood: An Egg Named “Joe”

As I wrote in my previous blog post “Who Am I?—Getting Impersonal,” the issue of who or what we really are vastly different from what we have been conditioned to believe.

Reading writers like Eckhart Tolle has made me begin to understand the liberating aspect of not only the philosophical truth of the concept that I don’t really exist, but rather the deep meaning of its essential underlying reality.

Some time ago I walked around my block and stopped to smell a rose, one among dozens in a beautiful garden near my apartment. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein – “did this rose have a name?”

Of course in our advanced technological age, for profit and for efficiency we do name piece of produce individually. The egg in the photo is unique in the sense that it has a bar coded “identity.”

Of course you and I also began as an egg; one that was fertilized to combine two sets of chromosomes from a father and mother, and when I “hatched” I got the identity Tom Bunzel.

Politicians and religious leaders today spend massive resources arguing about when you and I became a “person.”

The ancient Egyptians apparently believed that the identity formed in the womb when the pineal gland came into being, and was able to connect consciousness with the divine.

But neither the active pineal gland nor the religiously anointed person who became “me” is literally Tom Bunzel – that’s a label that was attached for convenience just like the bar code on the egg above.

The egg above is not named “Joe,” or even 876544990 in any sense other than by human convention. Life doesn’t know it as an individual anything; it is part of a long chain of “Being” that may have begun with a chicken, but we know how that goes.

As Eckhart Tolle describes in A New Earth, soon after the name is attached, the entity known as Tom Bunzel began to distinguish between things that were him and not him, and his and not his, and he learned that taking away things he thought belonged to him caused pain.

On top of the name, our parents, schools, peers, society and media then attached massive layers of conditioning to this identity, further strengthening our minds’ identification with “who we are.”

We also soon “learn” that we are smarter or less intelligent than others, better looking or less attractive, and so on, and these deeply grooved beliefs can shape our whole lives.

Unfortunately, as psychologists like Michael Hall point out, the massively overwhelming majority of this self-programming is negative—we are taught from an early age to think ahead and worry about the future, and look back and judge the past, taking us out of the reality of the present where all of life truly happens.

That’s why a realization of the fragility of one’s personal identity can be liberating. When a bit of space is created from the onslaught of our thoughts regarding who we are and what we ought to do, we can sometimes find a level of inner awareness and peace, and even love.

As I wrote in “Who Am I?—Getting Impersonal,” one meditation suggested by Tolle is to go inside and ask “Who am I?” Consider also that if you lost a limb, or even part of your brain, you would still be you, both legally and biologically. My friend Michael Jeffreys asks his students to try sincerely to go deep inside and literally search for the part of you that is You.

According to science we might think of ourselves as a Genome—the unique map of our genetic code (DNA) that came with fertilization of our egg and which has now been decoded by supercomputers.

But this code, unique though it may be, is still not alive until it interacts with the environment – taking in oxygen, nutrition and other energetic forces that “breathe life” into us. This is the basis for the new science of Epigenetics, which has found that you can take DNA out of a cell and it still functions, but it is the interaction with the world that determines how the code behaves, or in genetic terms, how genes “express.”

As I’ve pointed out before, it’s like the application Microsoft Word, which is a block of computer code just like our DNA, but computer software “expresses” its code electrically through a silicon chip in a computer according to interaction with an end user, and its “expression” can be a poem, a screenplay or a legal document.

According to geneticist Bruce Lipton what we really are is the evolutionary result of trillions of individual cells which organized themselves, for survival, into a more complex “organism,” culminating in the human brain.

And we know from the latest neuroscience that even our sense of self comes into being within the complex neural networks of our brain; as Antonio Damasio titled his book, “Self Comes to Mind.”

But we know that even the cells in our body aren’t static; our brain cells along with all of our other cells are dying and being replaced constantly.

So if “we” are anything, it’s a field of electrical energy and memory stored in the brain, and brought to mind by our thoughts as an Ego or identity which results from conditioning – the prior memories of the conditions of our lives.

Our consciousness is literally software. It is part of a vast ecosystem that some might call the Cosmos, and we are a tiny piece of that which might be termed “organic life.”

And just like the bar coded egg above, and you and me, all of the “identities” that exist are completely artificial constructions and concepts, originating through consciousness, in the human mind.

They exist only through and as a result of our thoughts—they are not part of nature or in fact “real” in any tangible sense. They can be represented by pieces of paper, like a driver’s license, but even these “things” refer only to an agreed upon identity or reality.

The value or reality of your driver’s license is the same as the money you use to pay the registration—it exists only be convention, agreement and the conditioning of humans.

Recently I attended an event at the Gateway where a monk who had studied in India entered an intense meditative state through breathing and inner work in which he just laughed—and for many who attended it became contagious.

I believe that when our meditation let some of us jettison the conditioning and identities that are our “Selves” the absurdity of the seriousness of who we are as finite physical beings becomes apparent – and we must laugh from the depth of our souls.

You can spend thousands of dollars in therapy to work through the various layers of conditioned beliefs and assumptions that influence how you experience life–or you can realize deeply that they are all related to “stories” connected to the past or “worries” about the future—and that to the extent they are believed they can interfere dramatically with the present—which where all of life truly “happens.”

Who Am I? — Getting Impersonal

According to Eckhart Tolle, when someone says he doesn’t know who he is, Tolle offers his congratulations, because the “person” is no longer identified with his own ego, or an illusory sense of self.

In fact, Tolle suggests that in meditation, a good mantra as you watch your thoughts float by, is to ask yourself “Who am I?” and go deeper, beyond your thoughts, to try to locate who or what is watching.

Or, for that matter, where in the body are “You.” Can you single out a location—as you sense something in your leg, are you your brain?

I discovered that abruptly confronting these ideas, and dropping the personality, without help or unexpectedly, can be a shock to the system.

During the summer of 2008, I had to drop my tech writing identity as Professor PowerPoint when my “career identity” began to evaporate, broke away from an identity as my girlfriend’s boyfriend/protector (emulating my father), and stopped seeing myself as a secure individual who worked and had savings, and essentially as someone who thought he knew what he was “doing.” As none of these identities or roles seemed to work, it isolated me more and more from the people with whom I’d been connected within these roles.

Looking back, I think that like a snake, I was shedding these roles, which were no longer comfortable for me, and it scared me to death.

Who was I?

I tested out some other identities; I took a trip to Kauai and found that, “wherever I went, there ‘I’ was”… Although the surroundings were beautiful and again comforting, and I stayed with wonderful friends, I felt alone, and isolated.

So what was happening? I sought out therapy and discovered the depth of the various layers of my personality, and in many cases their roots.

Another way to look at this can be clarified by thinking in terms of The Four Agreements written by don Miguel Ruiz. These four concepts of correct living are based on ancient Toltec wisdom—an Indian tribe from what is now Guatemala and Southern Mexico who preserved their wisdom mainly through an oral tradition.

Ruiz’s Four “Agreements” are:

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word

Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

2. Don’t Take Anything Personally

Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.

3. Don’t Make Assumptions

Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

4. Always Do Your Best

Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

All four of these are very valuable tenets, but obviously the one I focus on here is No. 2 – Don’t Take Anything Personally

Clearly, this is another way of saying don’t identify with any of the roles that you have been comfortable playing; don’t identify with your ego; your personality is a false self…

And also, don’t believe your thoughts when they try to lead you astray—into reaction and judgment.

The problem is—can you live like that? I discovered that I couldn’t.

An intense period of self-observation began with a process of watching myself and my reactions to people and situations as though I was in a laboratory, watching what made me scared and occasionally what made me feel comfortable or even happy.

This resonates with what Michael Jeffreys later suggested as “becoming the Scientist in your life, as opposed to the victim;” it was a revelation to me when I confronted the fact that the identity of victim was just as appealing to the ego as any of my other roles.

One immediate benefit of this attitude is that it suspends judgment.

And it lets you see clearly how you are operating.

It took a long time but I could clearly identify prejudices toward negativity that were not shared by others—and I connected those with “agreements” I made with my parents—not to accept the world as a safe or loving place and basically to suffer, because of what happened to them.

Again, Eckhart Tolle refers to this in some ways as one’s “pain body,” but more to the point he suggests strongly that if we observe ourselves with sincerity we can see a layer of negativity that underlies our perception of the world, and he says that “the world will always give us what we want” – in this case, pain.

After a period of self-observation and surrender, I saw myself clearly as having chosen negativity. I had one incident where I received two pieces of mail, and in both cases I felt a sense of dread, and actually anticipated bad news before I opened either envelope. I noticed those feelings arise and gasped.

And then? Neither letter met my expectations; AT&T had actually lowered my phone bill, and some other benefit payments were not suspended as I had feared.

For 62 years, I had functioned within this operating system of fear and negativity.

What could I do to change?

I had read hundreds of books and followed numerous teachings, after therapy I worked with groups that enabled me to connect with other people with similar experiences and who also had gotten glimpses of the same ideas through various teachings.

Ultimately, all of these teachings basically say: You’re not who you think you are.

As a writer I am in love with words and ideas, but through these experiences I began to realize on a very deep level that the very concepts I had allowed myself to take as real were a trap.

My personas, my beliefs, indeed these agreements were all encoded in language—that’s how I was programmed.

But through my epiphany with seeing the code in DNA I could somehow grasp the significance when Michael Jeffreys said, “don’t mistake the menu for the meal.”

Eckhart Tolle said, as soon as you name a flower or a bird, you’ve lost the connection with its essence, echoing the previously quoted idea of Krishnamurti—once you teach a child the name of the bird he loses the capacity to truly see it.

So what have my thoughts, beliefs, ideas and concepts separated me from?

Life.

Or as Dr. Vijay Shankar puts it in a brilliant DVD: “Life as it Is.” (This is the teaching sometimes referred to as Non Dualism).

That reality of Life as it actually exists can be experienced in the night sky, when one looks at the stars and realizes that beyond one’s limited comprehension lies what we can call an “infinite” space.

But like the word “God,” the word “infinite” is simply a placeholder – a variable in computer terminology – for something we cannot really grasp or understand in its totality.

Most people I know, indeed many of my closest friends, don’t have a problem with this.

Life is random for them—they are able to just enjoy it while it lasts.

I always wanted answers, and it brought me to my knees.

The answer seems to be—life is to be lived, not to be understood.

But something else is going on. There is a recognition (re-cognition—remembering or knowing something we once knew?) that Life is not random.

For one thing, there is a code to organic life that instructs it—like the software in our computer.

We sense that the science we have placed our faith in is incomplete because it doesn’t take Life into account—and we are Life itself not as thought or words, but as an Observer–as Consciousness.

Beyond the many concepts that have served us in manipulating nature, building civilization as we know it, is a reality that every so often makes us realize, even as a species, we can’t take things “personally.”

Most species are extinct. Worlds and suns dies, ice ages come and go, comets and asteroids are real, all on a scale of time we don’t really comprehend–but which sometimes affects us in ways we may refer to as “acts of God.”

I believe that is the disquieting realization that is taking hold and making many of us even more afraid.

But we can’t really take it personally. It’s just Life. And to the extent that it is not experienced as a series of separate events beyond “our” control that make us afraid (victims)—and instead, we are able to surrender to its magnificence because we begin to sense that Life is Intelligent, and realize that it moves in ways far beyond the limitations of our own our own limited brains—we can breathe a bit more easily and have a sense of fulfillment.

If anything, the rhythm of Life is played out in the tides, and it resonates not within our minds, but in our hearts.

Who Am I and What Are We? The Latest Lessons of Neuroscience

Like many people, for most of my life I’ve equated who I am with what goes on between my ears. Then I began reading the work of Eckhart Tolle and others and became aware that much of what passes for thought is counterproductive and automatic, and frequently negative.

As I’ve tried to “make sense” of my experience I’ve come to realize more and more that “who” I have assumed was “me” was really the result of a jumble of thoughts, emotions, sensations and experiences that are always changing—so who am I?

In fact, Eckhart Tolle suggests using this phrase as a mantra during meditation to attempt to locate the one indivisible “I” inside oneself that one believes that one is—to discover literally that there is no one or nothing there. It can be a hard notion to get one’s head around—because one’s head doesn’t want to believe it.

Again, many people identify themselves with their minds or the activity of their brain, so I’ve become very interested in the science behind what we often call consciousness.

With my own background in philosophy, and specifically phenomenology, I received a first jolt in college from a different perspective—that being is prior to identity—the converse of Descartes “I think therefore I am”—which Eckhart Tolle also disputes as putting the cart before the horse.

Not surprisingly the very branch of philosophy that fascinated me runs counter to conventional science, and my teacher was denied tenure for running afoul the norm in academia – logical positivism. This philosophy only discusses what it can know for certain – I said, “good luck with that.”

So it was with great interest that I recently watched another video on YouTube by a noted philosopher:  Julian Baggin – Is there a Real You?

In this piece he makes many of the points Tolle makes in his books; namely that it is our mind that imposes its structure on a world that has no such definitions. Interestingly he uses PowerPoint slides to evoke a sense that the concepts we impose on the world through language is not part of the natural world at all, but exist only between our ears.

His example is a schematic of a simple water molecule with two circles to represent H (hydrogen) and one for O (oxygen) and the word “Water” superimposed on their connected state.

Removing the word “water” still leaves the molecule and its reality unchanged, and obviously our description of water is not a part of its true nature at all—it exists only within us.

Eckhart Tolle makes the same point with respect to “clock time”—which is useful for making appointments but does not exist in the world. He says that for a bird, for example, the time is always “Now.”

Similarly there are no borders within any continental land mass—humans have superimposed their grid on nature to carve up property that, for example, a Martian may not respect (nor a Native American, for that matter).

Baggin goes on to state that the notion of one’s identity – the “I” that one is – is similarly imposed on a collection of organs and cells that innately are not truly a “person” or even a “human being”—both human definitions. He traces this notion to ancient belief systems like Buddhism and Hinduism, and perhaps even earlier.

Then in neuroscience, it turns out that this apparent function of sense making, which results in one’s seeing oneself as a “Self”, is the result of a critical mass of complexity in neural network creation that results from an incredible confluence of electrical signals that work in harmony.

In his book Self Comes to Mind, Antonio Damasio states that this miraculous harmonious functioning which results in a sense of self emerges for evolutionary reasons—for the same reason that a microbe will gravitate toward nourishment and away from toxins—for “homeostasis” or basically to maintain its being—it is programmed to survive.

On the human level, with the development of advanced brains, this is merely far more complex, but Damasio asserts that the concept of a Self is merely the result of when this newly evolved brain bonded with the organic systems from the previous eons, forming one new complete extremely complex system = the Mind/Body or what we call “human.”

He adds that out of this emerged the “Autobiographical Self” as conductor of a symphony who does not exist until the orchestra begins to play [harmoniously]. And this is the result of the underlying nature of life itself – he says, “Managing and safekeeping life is the fundamental premise of biological value.” (page 25)

“Consciousness came into being because of biological value, as contributor to more effective value management. [natural selection] But consciousness did not invent biological value or the process of valuation. Eventually, in human minds, consciousness revealed biological value and allowed the development of new ways and means of managing it.” (page 28)

In other words, what we deem intelligence and more significantly who we are is the result of a far higher intelligence that preceded the development of our own brains to notice our “selves” and begin to comprehend nature itself, all for our continued survival.

So who are “we” individually? Basically we’re a collection of stories that come together out of experiences formed electrically through the firing of neural networks and stored in the soft tissue of the brain’s “hard drives” or what we call memory.

According to neuroscientists like Damasio, the Self “emerges” from a level of cognitive complexity that yields consciousness – similar to the critical mass attained in a computer network – such as the Internet.

Having now experienced the reality of how inanimate systems (like the Internet) can mimic our own inner mental functioning and even defeat us at Jeopardy, can we now open up to the possibility that our own fascination with our own “uniqueness” as sentient beings is a fantasy?

Just as our egocentric cosmology of the earth being the center of the universe has now given way to the reality that we exist on the periphery of an average galaxy literally in the middle of nowhere, so too maybe we need to come to terms with the fact that what we deem to be us, and what we think is “conscious”, is a mere tip of an enormous iceberg of sensory capacity of which we are just barely aware.

Bear in mind that “primitive” cultures have known this for years. Our science scoffs at their sense of the sacred and worship of the sun, moon, stars, seasons, rain, and other natural forces as intelligences beyond their control and complete comprehension.

And where has our narrow focus led us with our non-sacred science? To the edge of an abyss of extinction –first for the other naturally created creatures we exterminate daily and ultimately for our “selves” – those same magical beings that apparently exist only in our own minds.

As George Carlin once said when commenting on the notion of “Saving the Planet “– “don’t worry, the planet will do just fine. It will be here long after we’re gone.”

Can we say the same for “human kind” – or the selves we think we are—an intelligent creature at the apex of evolution and in control of our destiny and environment.

It may be high time we woke up to the reality of our own delusion.

Computer Death: A Lesson in Life and Impermanence

In my previous post I had a photo of my cat perched atop my PC; I wish I had saved that photo to use for this entry because the computer in question passed away last week.

Coincidentally it happened a week after an evening I attended hosted by Michael Jeffreys for a discussion on “Death – What Does it Mean to You?” The evening focused on The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying but turned into a personal examination of the reality of our impermanence of everything around us—including of course our physical bodies.

I remember bringing this up with another friend a while back and I just said matter of factly, “You know, you’re going to die,” and he got really upset like bringing it up might make it happen sooner.

Our culture’s main response to the question of death is denial while in other places and times the notion of death was considered an essential part of the cycle of life and not to be feared or shunted aside.

During our evening the question became “what are we really?” – and several people, including me, described experiences with loved ones who passed away as though “something ephemeral left the body” and suddenly where there was energy and life there was just an inert mass of flesh.

The reality is that we need to accept the fact that “our life” as we know it will end. Of course the question becomes, does anything live on and does anyone know?

So last Wednesday I routinely pushed the “On” button on my desktop PC and nothing happened. A few jiggles with the power cables and a look inside the case revealed nothing different – it just would not power up—energy was no longer coursing through its electrical arteries and veins and its brain (CPU) was inert.

I’ve dealt effectively with software problems, when Windows would not load or it wouldn’t boot, but hardware isn’t my thing so a took it to a techie who is highly reviewed on Yelp (Kingly Computers on La Cienega) and two hours later, on the operating table, my PC was pronounced DOA – he told me the motherboard was fried, along with the power supply and replacing it was not cost effective—I would need a new PC.

I was strangely unaffected by the news; the “official pronouncement” still had me try to revive the unit one last time and then I had no choice other than complete acceptance of the reality.

Fortunately, however, my important data “lived on” with my laptop, where I assiduously mirror my work and back my files up on various secondary disks.

But many of my living entities – my software programs – were on two hard drives on the PC that could never be revived because they would need to be “reinstalled” on another computer and operating system. These were the active entities – the mental energy that cooperates with whoever I am and performs the tasks of word processing, web surfing, and so on.

Their instruction code – or DNA – was physically existent – and some of it could even be transferred to another “living” PC through various means, but I would have to reconstruct the actual “life” of my computer if I bought another one by first installing the operating system, and then loading a series of program into memory and invoking certain customized settings to get everything to work as I wanted it—the new computer would be born and then would have to “mature” under my care.

These new programs and settings, along with files I might transfer from my laptop, would be a new set of “experiences” for the PC—most of which were directly conditioned by “subroutines” (Software code) that was loaded into its memory consciously by me.

I looked on Craig’s List for a living entity (computer that worked electrically and had my same operating system (Vista, God help me) loaded) which I could “re-condition” with my own programs and settings.

Truth be told some of this would entail opening the case and “transplanting” several system boards (organs?) that would enable me to continue using various scanners and graphics cards.

This potential task of cloning my old PC into a new one proved too time consuming when I had a laptop already working, so I just backed up all my data and figured out ways to connect my laptop to some of my devices, and accepted the fact that my laser printer and an old scanner would also live no more, at least with me.

If I go overboard with the analogies to living beings it’s to make one significant point – they aren’t analogies and the computer will never be alive.

But the reality is that our own being is instructed by DNA, or code, that runs exactly the way the software in my computer works. The tree in the picture above continues to grow according to the same genetic instructions—it just doesn’t have a brain to drive it crazy.

Therefore, whatever the energy, or combination of energies, that powers up you and me (and the tree) — namely Life — and allows us to “function” until our power switch is shut off — is of a completely different order of magnitude than what we’ve put into computers, “in our image”, as I like to say.

But as Eckhart Tolle writes so well, the power within us is far more intelligent—neuroscientists tell us that our brains have more neurons than there are stars in the galaxy, and an intelligence courses through us that when it’s working, coordinates “peripherals” like digestion, circulation, respiration, and more, all without our conscious attention to these incredible functions.

So just as we name our computers to locate them on our networks, we can begin to ask, what part of our own living system is truly our “I”?

Is it the physical component that we know will wear out and pass away, completely impermanent?

Is it some kind of energetic power that “animates” us while we’re living, or perhaps a soul?

But really, when we think about our “selves”, don’t we generally refer to that portion of us which I wanted so badly to replant into a new PC which were my “settings” – my memory – or my various stories which comprise my “identity.”

But when I look back at my PC, those aspects of its existence, the data, the programs, the memory and peripherals, everything except the energy that animated it is impermanent and now gone.

A bit of it lives on in its “cousin”, my laptop.

Ironically I also tried to “revive” an old Vaio laptop to take the place of the desktop. Here too the hardware had passed on – the hard drive was defective and would need replacement.

Losing both the desktop and old laptop was frustrating and at one time would have set me back—as it is when I look at the empty space on my desk I feel a bit of a void, mainly in terms of inconvenience—certainly not the grief I would feel for a loss of life.

But the sense of what has occurred has led me to understand that the nonphysical aspects of both the computer and ourselves are real—the mental and spiritual (if you will) aspects that exist ephemerally as the software that instructs the machine, and the DNA and perhaps even a soul that animates our selves do exist in reality—and where and for how long?

The “ideas” in the hard drive might be revived in another body (desktop machine).

But there is a realization that what truly continues and has just barely begun to understand the vastness of the entire process, just dimly, is another entity that witnessed the entire drama, and experienced both the loss and the rebirth of the energetic aspects– as I continue my work this morning—and that would of course be me.

So the ultimate question becomes, what is “my identity”? Is it my set of conditioned programs that I take myself to be, many of which react almost mechanically to life’s many circumstances, or is there perhaps some other faculty—an intelligent energy or software (consciousness, if I dare call it that) that isn’t me (because I will die), but expresses through my DNA and data as long as my power switch works?

Neuroscience has discovered that who “we” are is complex set of electrical signals that are influenced by our DNA, the environment and even our experiences and thoughts.

My sense now is that just as my own intelligence has enabled me to manage my computer, that there is a higher level of intelligence “aware” within me of how I can best operate—and it’s not my conditioned mind, which nearly freaked out when the power didn’t come on, but a new faculty that recognizes that the “I” I thought I was is just not that significant…

And in its stead, a more quiet, contemplative witness to all that has occurred continues. Like the screen on which I am writing this text—it is not my story, but the space in which it appears.

Resolution: Connect with Life with a Capital “L”

I had lunch with a woman whom I hired to edit my writing and to let me know if it made any sense. Among her other criteria was the notion of consistency, and she pointed out that I had seemingly haphazardly referred to life sometimes in Upper Case (Capitalized) as Life, and more often as it is normally spelled, as “life.”

My first response was to think about how I might fix this problem with a global search and replace, thereby rendering my work consistent.

But when I reflected on my intention in capitalizing Life in some circumstances, and then when I began to try to explain it her, I decided that this apparent distinction was at the very heart of what I want to convey.

Along these lines, Eckhart Tolle describes his “awakening”; in the throes of deep depression and anxiety and considering suicide, he had the thought “I can’t stand my life.”

He parsed the words and considered the notion of who the “I” might be that couldn’t stand his “life”, and realized that there wasn’t just one of him—the self, but rather another faculty that was making judgments among a host of conditioned “selves”. His subsequent work is really about the realization that the separate “life” he was judging and hating was an identification with this judgmental intellectual part, but that that wasn’t “Life”. It is a misconception that leads to suffering.

Another way Eckhart Tolle puts it is that he realized he didn’t “have a life,” he was and is Life, which he goes on to explain as the embodiment and manifestation (as are we all) of much higher energies and intelligence than the narrow range of thoughts that we identify with as our analytical minds as “me.”

His example, and the fact that the instruction set for Life (DNA) requires a supercomputer to decode but is based on an astonishingly versatile set of mental constructs (software), is that various vastly intelligent programs run your digestion, breathing, circulation and so on – “you” (your mind which you take as your life) doesn’t run them.

In fact the deeper you look inside, with meditation or simple self observation, you discover how automated and conditioned even your mental processes are, a fact that modern neuroscience is deciphering almost daily. The “self” or “your life” that you take yourself to “have” is a complex amalgam of stories, memories, experiences, warnings and instincts to which you and society have agreed to affix an identity – in my case “Tom Bunzel.”

But this life, in lower case, only exists in the minds of humans who agree, for example, that I’m a writer in West L.A. and for the moment Barack Obama is President of the United States.

Those mental agreements have only existed as long as humans have been conscious and communicated with language.

But Life has existed at least as long as the universe, which our amazing minds have discovered is about 4.7 billion years old.

My cat is Life. She isn’t “Eva” (her “name”), or “my cat” but rather an expression of a confluence of energies and intelligence that we know exists (we know that we “are”) but that any set of words and concepts cannot fully describe or do justice in its “being.” (what it really Is).

When she jumps on my bed and I feel her fur between my fingers the experience is Life happening through me and her—my subsequent reflection (“This is nice”) overrides the experience, if I let it.

My computer, as amazing as it is, isn’t Life—but it is an important part of my life. Like my thinking mind, it’s one hell of a tool.

Some people who need answers in words will immediately ask if my concept of Life with a capital “L” is God. Similarly people inquired of Eckhart Tolle whether his reference to Being as primary before the Ego or the Self is God.

To me, Life, Being, and God are concepts that convey meaning and as such they have power—but none of them exist outside of a human mind the same way that my cat does. And none of them can truly capture the essence of Life…

This was very likely the message conveyed by the living being called Jesus whose birth we celebrated this past weekend. From a deep reading of his story and parables one can gather he too counseled that the “Kingdom of Heaven” could be found within, beyond words or concepts.

Nonetheless the apparent story of his life became the basis for powerful political forces to gain control of nations and ideas. It led to a meaning for God that many people still argue and fight over.

To go back to the dichotomy of life and Life, let’s return to this week, which concludes with a “New Year.”

This again is a concept agreed upon in peoples’ minds—the Sun, Moon and Solar System know nothing of our concept of a new year. It is certainly based on mathematical and astronomical relationships which have been known for centuries, but as many of us reflect upon its meaning, with think about our “lives.”

We construct intentions and resolutions to make our “lives” better, comparing them—and our “selves”– to others and measuring our worth or progress according to the beliefs and conditioning which have shaped our entire “lives.”

But what, if instead, we could devote just some of our attention to Life—with a capital L?

Begin with the miracle that we exist at all. This is something we take for granted but it need not be, and indeed, if we are honest, it will not last forever. The earth will probably exist for another million years, but none of “us” will.

As Eckhart Tolle also points out , “Life” will go on. Your life and mine will almost certainly end in this century.

For many this notion is stark and depressing, but that assessment is again a function of our conditioning and concepts. Ultimately we know it is true—perhaps with a capital T.

It is my feeling, to the extent that I can bring a space between my thoughts and my “Self”, that freeing ourselves from our identification with our small lives, and beginning to recognize the reality of Life as far greater and grander than what we can know intellectually, is the awakening many are now experiencing.

(It can lead to considerable discomfort).

But a big part of this is the sudden recognition, jarring though it can be, that we control very little and are not in the center of Life itself, but a small part of it—just as Copernicus and Galileo put us on a single orbit within the Solar System, and the Hubble telescope has shown us that we truly exist on the outer periphery of just one ordinary galaxy, among billions.

Our amazing minds—through sciences like astronomy, quantum physics and now neuroscience need to comprehend and experience this same gap, and they are approaching it, as their discoveries in these fields point clearly to the limitation of our true knowledge of reality. We know for example on the quantum level that until a mind/consciousness actually does perceive or become conscious of a subatomic particle (through our instruments), its actual location is not known with certainty but only by its potential (an idea).

This puts Life (as conscious awareness) at the center of our being—not our minds.

On an experiential level we also can sense this with our newly evolved global nervous system, the Internet, and our interaction with software—which is an active, intelligent energy expressing itself through electricity—primitive when compared to Life but amazingly effective and powerful in our lives.

Software, as a manifestation of our own intention and thought, is the closest thing we’ve created to a living consciousness or being. If you reflect on this, and compare it to the fact that your own cells, with their DNA, work the same way, as do the neurons in your brain, it can open you up to a different level of understanding and perception.

But the most obvious way to connect with Life with a capital L is to get out of our cities and look at the night sky as it really is—the recognition that this is real must be absorbed in the gut, not just the mind. Indeed, mentally, we cannot take it in—only in our bodies do we sense that we are truly here amid this infinite swirl of energy and intelligence and that like Life, we are not things, but sentient beings expressing a profoundly sacred set of natural laws.

The very notion of infinity is a function of our minds’ limitation—we know there will always be a larger number, and there must also be a further galaxy—but how… It cannot be known by our thinking mind.

It can only be felt. That is why I use the word “sacred”—because our mental distinction between science and religion is also a misconception. There is only one thing happening—and it encompasses everything—including our narrow concepts of science and religion, and even “God.”

So my resolution is to celebrate being here rather than reflecting on “how it’s going.”

Happy New Year – another “day” of Life.

What Is Software?

It is the core principle of this blog, and the main theme of the book I am completing, that computer software represents something completely new in human evolution, and is in fact a pointer to the true nature of both our species, and reality.

I first became fascinated with software when I needed a job in L.A. and got training in one of the first and most powerful dedicated word processors, the IBM System 6, at a law firm. The manager handed me a series of six large floppy disks, showed me how to load them into the console, and walked away. Several nights later, after completing the tutorial s on the disks, the machine had “trained me.”

So what is the software itself?

Certainly not the floppy disks which I used to learn System 6, nor the DVDs we currently use.

It’s not even the arcane progression of bizarre coded sentences that programmers write to get the results they want when the software “runs”.

Nor is it the series of zeroes and ones that the code is compiled into to make it work within the chips and circuits of the machine in which the magic happens –

Software is the first humanly created evidence of Intelligent Energy. The mental intentions of a (team of) programmers manifests through the code and exchanges information, energy, or mental vibrations with the user and the environment.

Another key aspect of comprehending the meaning of software is to understand a concept that I used to hammer home frequently when I taught people how to use complex software—the essential difference between a program and a file.

A file is a thing—the document I save for this blog is a file.

Microsoft Word, the application I use to create and modify this document is a program – it is an active agent of change, again taking the intention of the programmer(s) and providing a conduit between their desires (to help the user do word processing and in the process, go public and become millionaires) and the intentions of the user (to create a document) through precisely coded interaction.

This distinction between a program and a file is important for many reasons—not the least of which is that when you want to save your work—and especially when you try to back it up—it’s easy to safeguard your “things” — the files – on a second drive, and reuse them later.

In the early days of PCs, it was also relatively easy to save the programs on a drive and move them elsewhere—not you can’t do it because with the complexity of the operating system and the programs themselves (their “Evolution”, if you will), they require a sophisticated block of code called a Registry to function properly, and they are entangled with numerous other settings and blocks of software on your machine, specifically designed to protect the copyright and make the function better, so they cannot be easily moved and replaced.

So applications on the computer—the programs—are of a completely different Nature than files.

They are active agents of change in the environment—and the processes they invoke are only static when begun and completed—while the software is “in use” things are constantly changing—on a page, on the screen, in an email, you name it.

And in a word processor, for example, where the cursor is NOW–is the only place change can be intentionally implemented.

If you’re beginning to get the idea that software is the nearest thing that man has created that is Life-like (in our own image—using our own logic and mathematics), we’re on the same wavelength.

Buckminster Fuller famously said and wrote, “I think I am a verb.” I believe what he meant was that it is vital, when comprehending reality, to understand the essential difference between a thing and an intelligently intentional agent—an application.

Software is a an active agent of intelligent change that we have created that seems “alive” when the computer is turned on. But it is not a thing or a file—it is a being, primitive though it may be, for the duration that it “runs”, that manifests the intention of human intelligence.

There are files and there are applications on the computer—we are not mere files… We exchange energy and create meaning based on intelligence and intention, just as the software that runs in our computers does—and just as our bodies do with the instructions of DNA code.

Yet, so many of us act as though we are things. We are our jobs, our families, our identities—indeed we carry static images (licenses) that identify us for the purpose of “living” in compartments and categories.

But is that our interior experience—if we look closely?

Or are we as teachers like Eckhart Tolle suggest, never static things but instead verbs –the manifestation of Being—and isn’t that what software can effectively teach us as we use it day in and day out?

I’ve speculated in previous entries about whether the software that we create (Artificial Intelligence) will ever be human. To me there are scales of Life and software is a pointer to us of what Tolle writes is the vast intelligence at work within us—coded in part in our DNA—and running applications of immense complexity and depth in our heart (circulation), brain and nervous system (thought and intentionality) and throughout our organs – digestion, breath, metabolism – and all in a perpetual harmony that we unconsciously take for granted.

We have been conditioned, perhaps for the sake of our survival and evolution, to conceptualize our “Selves” as individual, separate things – or files. But what if we begin to see ourselves as programs—as active, complex, living applications and agents of consciousness—manifestations of an intelligence that preceded even the existence of the human species.

Viewed from this perspective, Existence, or “Being” itself is an incredible fact of Life. We live it day in and day out but identify completely, for the most part, with only one insignificant component—our assessments (Good/Bad) of “how it’s going”?

Can our experience with software provide a deeper understanding—that our limited perspective of our selves as individual files is inaccurate, and that we are really part of a vast interplay of an immensely intelligently based set of programs?

But what about stepping back and looking at the Big Picture. If we in fact do for ourselves what Copernicus did for astronomy, and take the assumption of our “Selves” out of the center of what is “happening” – how might our perspective on Life, and in fact the way we actually live, be changed?

Tolle calls this artificial concept of ourselves as the centers of Life our Ego—or the chattering Mind, as opposed to Consciousness or Being itself—the software that manifests as us—of which we are both scientifically and largely even spiritually ignorant.

Do the Math: How the Perfection of Number Points To the Reality of Mind (Part 2)

Biomimicry-Engineering/Nature Burr=Velcro

(Continued from Part 1)

Hofstadter, in his book I Am a Strange Loop, takes issue with futurists like Ray Kurzweil who believe that our artificial intelligence will naturally evolve according to Moore’s law and inexorably lead to a conscious (Turing) machine with fully natural (human) qualities, indistinguishable from another (real) person.

To me the inevitably fallacy of any concept of “living” artificial intelligence comes as the result of realizing that although the computer metaphor for consciousness as software is perfect—we are running software (loopy programs that manifest a Mind that cannot be described completely in language)—in Nature this software represents a scale of intelligence far beyond our own. And what is a metaphor or analogy anyway—a pointer to Truth.

As an example, in nature, our limited conception of the universe is as infinite. We also know that a sequence of numbers is infinite and yet the largest actual numbers are still inaccessible to our limited minds—and even our supercomputers.

On the other hand, in Nature the Fibonacci sequence manifests imperfectly but potentially infinitely in living forms:

 

http://www.mathacademy.com/pr/prime/articles/fibonac/fibonac_8.gif

And as a species, evolving as we have to make incredible tools and products, a field called Biomimicry has emerged – biologically inspired engineering – other examples include Sharkskin inspired swimsuit that pay homage to the higher perfection of Life or Nature in its manifestation of Number in Form (Matter).

Hofstadter goes through every complex nook and cranny of Gödel’s work to basically argue that the only way to comprehend consciousness is through “story” – or by analogy – and just as the linguistic descriptions of mathematical absolutes fall short, so too does story or analogy never completely “explain” or “describe” the true “nature” of consciousness.

Ultimately he settles on one aspect of language as the pointer to reality and meaning—analogy; so keep in mind our issue with the “metaphor” that is the relationship of hardware to software.

Hofstadter’s sense of what is “animate” comes down to the existence of the self-sustaining loops that blow our minds – like the placement of two mirrors facing each other or his example of a video feedback loop of a camera facing a monitor.

He writes, “…an entity is animate [alive?] to the degree that such a loopy “I” pattern comes into existence, since this pattern’s existence is by no means an all-or-nothing affair. Thus, to the extent that there is an “I” pattern in a given substrate, there is animacy, and where there is no such pattern, the entity is inanimate.” (page 360)

Hofstadter’s contends that as systems evolved, for example cells organized into organs like the heart and eventually the brain, when feedback loops manifest as “selves”—at this point organic molecules become animate or “alive.”

Hofstadter still assumes, however, that such organization happened by evolution randomly, even if according to nature’s patterns like the Fibonacci sequence.

But I see it another way. I find the very existence of such patterns evidence of the presence of a quality in nature that science finds “unscientific” but which I consider the “presence of mind” (pun!).

To me Mind is a function of order and indeed mathematics (Function=another pun)—and our ignorance of that in our current culture is the root of many problems.

Indeed the march of science has illuminated the fact that all of nature conforms to such patterns—the subject of an enormous book by James Gleick, The Information, which essentially traces the human discovery of meaning within nature according to what science considers “data.”

But if we open slightly to the possibility, beyond our intellect or conditioning, and consider that perhaps Life is more than mere data — that the animate force behind life (which the Egyptians thought of as the function Phi—the mathematical ratio of the Fibonacci sequence) literally—is Mind—an immaterial intelligence of which we are mainly ignorant—a lot begins to actually make “sense” in a different way.

Consider the possibility that the Pythagorean theorem and the Fibonacci sequence did not originate with the Greeks, its knowledge is far more ancient and was considered sacred by ancient civilizations, such as the Egyptians.

As I have noted, in addition to the Pi relationship, the Phi relationship and the Pythagorean relationship of the sides of the right triangle are apparently depicted in ancient monoliths—and the most stark and famous example is the Great Pyramid of Giza.

I became fascinated with this concept when I first read Secrets of the Great Pyramid: Two Thousand Years of Adventures and Discoveries Surrounding the Mysteries of the Great Pyramid of Cheops by Peter Tompkins, which incidentally has an appendix by a renowned Italian mathematician, Livio Stecchini that further probes the depths of these relationships.

The key point here is that the ancient wisdom did not distinguish between science and religion—the awareness of this higher nature of Life as the manifestation of an infinite Mind was sacred—as were many of the rituals that were meant to preserve this knowledge.

Of course, in the vast spans of time since this knowledge was fully flourishing, we are left with mere fragments that are further distorted and ignored by conventional archeology and astronomy—branches of our science that are cut off from religion and philosophy entirely.

And we can only speculate where this ancient wisdom originated. For those of you with open minds, I recommend the Ancient Aliens series on the History Channel and the work of Erik von Daniken.

 

 

Do the Math: How the Perfection of Number Points to the Reality of Mind (Part 1)

(http://www.mathacademy.com/pr/prime/articles/fibonac/fibonac_9.gif)

I have long been fascinated by math but I reached a precipice in school when I ran up against Calculus; I once asked my teacher if he could explain by example what in nature represents “the function of a number”—I was desperate, I said, because I could see the application of geometry and algebra, in which I excelled, but not calculus.

He looked at me disdainfully and said simply, “no.” That’s when I switched to Liberal Arts.

Ironically, my current fascination with computers is the result of their “living” functions—software—which are mathematical algorithms that perform tasks—they are active verbs – and of course the hardware/software relationship has been used as a powerful metaphor for the mind and brain.

But is it merely a metaphor or analogy? That is the essential issue of this post and the entire blog…

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter is a wonderful book, a follow-up to a Pulitzer prize winning best-seller , Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid that seeks to demonstrate the unique qualities of a mind that expresses itself in language, along with the inevitable gaps and paradoxes that result in believing too much in the logic of our spoken and written descriptions of “what is real.”

As a mathematician, neuroscientist and philosopher Hofstadter begins with the primacy of number because whatever symbols you use to represent “number”, certain truths persist.

For example, as Pythagoras famously asserted, the sums of the squares of a right triangle always add up to the square of the hypotenuse.

Remember – and consider – it does not matter what you call these concepts—they are mental constructs that are absolutely true.

 

Hofstadter, like Leonardo da Vinci, fucuses on a famous set of numbers that are also manifest in nature, and to many throughout history have represented a “Golden Mean” or perfect ratio, also called the number Phi (not Pi).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi_ratio

In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers are the numbers that conform to this ratio in the following sequence of integers:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10946, 17711, 28657, 46368, 75025, 121393, 196418, 317811

By definition, the first two numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are 0 and 1, and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two. (in the relation of Phi).

If I understand Hofstadter’s key point, it is that the idea of such a sequence of number is primary and causal—and can be described in a different set of symbols, namely the English language as – a sequence of numbers such that each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two

Similarly one can define some members of this “set” of numbers in English as being “prime”, that is, indivisible by any number other than themselves and the number 1.

Okay, and there one can come up with very complex theorems and formulae to “describe” the relationships to ascertain which numbers, as one gets very large approaching infinity, are in fact prime and members of the Fibonacci sequence.

What Hofstadter points out, however, is the discovery of mathematician Kurt Gödel, that when one goes from the primary set of symbols (numbers) to our “understanding” of them represented by language; i.e., though about those symbols, very weird anomalies of logic come up that result in “strange loops”—infinite progressions without resolutions or perhaps paradoxes.

Still, in terms of scale, it is interesting to consider that there are vast Prime Numbers whose characteristics we can describe (indivisible by any number other than themselves and the number 1), and yet which our own brains and even the supercomputers we’ve invented have not yet “discovered”—yet which according to our language, analogies and suppositions must exist…

It was proven by Euclid that there are infinitely many prime numbers; thus, there is always a prime greater than the largest known prime (Wikipedia).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Digits_in_largest_prime_by_year.svg

Here is a “prime” example of another such a paradox or anomaly:

The sentence “This sentence has ten words” has ten words. (I am a Strange Loop, page 140)

Here we can see how our verbal or linguistic description of a mathematical truth (which is absolute—see the infallibility of the Fibonacci sequence stretching out to infinity) is inevitably fraught with fallacy and “looping.”

This strikes me as significant to several levels. First if we look at how we use computer software to manifest concepts through software, we first write them out in code (language) and then compile them into a sequence of numbers (zeroes and ones) to express in “reality” (through the physical machine)—displaying on screen and interacting with other users.

To Hofstadter (I think), this paradoxical aspect of language is an obvious manifestation of mind which simulates nature on a very powerful level—by analogy it seems to mirror our own inner mental workings—but it cannot “explain” Nature or for that matter infinite sequences of number.

It can only explain characteristics.

Language, like our inner “I”, is looped and imperfect—by the inherent limitation of needing to be expressed in language, and consequently reducing the perfection of the absolute it describes (mathematical certainly; number) to what our limited minds can comprehend—fragmented, imperfect analogies to reality.

(Continued in Part 2)

Where is the “I” in Artificial “I”ntelligence?

One of the issues that has come up in my musings about technology is whether a computer can ever become “human” and what it would take.

This was the basisof the so-called “Turing Machine” speculated about by Alan Turing in 1936 where he wondered whether a machine that manipulated data could ever perform at a level where a human who interacted with it could not tell it was a machine.

More recently in a piece I wrote on “Thoughts on IBM v. Jeopardy” I contended that being able to manipulate information at a spectacular speed doesn’t make you human.

I would suggest that most people when confronted with this issue would say something like: to be human is to “have a sense of self” – to know oneself as separate and have an identity.

Indeed that is how we are deeply conditioned. From birth we are given a name and learn what is ours and what isn’t, and later on we’re given a social security number and finally a death certificate.

But as neuroscientist David Eagleman has pointed out so eloquently in Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (along with many others), the self is not indivisible. Eagleman points to the latest brain research that says that there is not one part of the physical self that contains the “I”; indeed he explains that the brain is such a complex entity that is many networks are like a “democracy of committees” which coordinate behavior by consensus and make choices in ways we don’t fully understand.

Taking this a step further, let’s consider animals. There is no doubt that many of our pets learn their “names” and even come when called. Being somewhat territorial, they may also have a sense of “my toy” and of course “my yard” – but where does that really come from, or is it the owner’s projection of her own set of concepts?

Going into the wild can yield an interesting perspective. Let’s say a jaguar eats an antelope.

Does it think to itself, wow, I (Joe the Jaguar) really nailed that one?

In fact does it think of itself as an individual at all? Think about a pride of lions—do they identify individually? And can’t we take a broader perspective that in fact the entire jungle or forest is one big Ecosystem in which energy is being transformed as one creature dies and another is born and lives.

Sort of the like the Cycle of Life in Lion King, come to think of it.

So getting back to us, where does our notion of “I” come from and develop?

I would speculate that it is somehow connected to the size of our brain, cognitive ability, and most specifically the emergence of language.

Once we began to articulate and conceptualize names for things (that belonged to us not to “them”) our identities as individuals crystallized in a way that is “artificial” – these names or concepts do not exist in the real world.

For example – Wednesday or the border between Texas and Mexico would never exist without humans. We conceptualized it and named it.

And our language, when placed inside the computer, has become programming. Two simple examples can illustrate where I’m going.

One programming method is an “If/Then” statement. If the user puts a number 21 or higher into the form for “Age”, then he gets to register to vote, or do something naughty.

A similar linguistic convention that works in programming lets the machine “count” – it’s summarized as “next i” – so that a loop begins where the machine looks at successive “i’s” (or instances) and sees if they’re true. Then in the ten thousandth record (found in less than a tenth of a second) the software finds the “Bunzel” that lives in Zip Code “90025″.

In this way we have built incredibly powerful machines that can take us to Mars and beyond.

Let’s go back to the jungle—this time a primitive soul is walking along and there is a rustle in the bushes but our ancient ancestor has no language yet.

Does he think – If lion then run but if antelope then hunt?

Not really, he has no vocabulary—but on some level he still responds chemically and biologically to the stimulus and moves accordingly.

In this way we can see how the development of language however led to survival—a few million years later his offspring can go back and tell the others – “hey, there’s a freaking lion in there.”

But this shows how entirely “artificial” our own “I” really is – because to the extent that it is a function of higher evolution and the complexity of the brain – and we really have many different “selves” operating habitually and through our conditioning – it’s not real.

It’s a concept. A function of our evolving capacity to think in words and become conditioned in a series of “I”‘s that were once critical for survival, but now can cause problems.

This can be incredibly liberating if we meditate on it and take it in.

It means that when “we” don’t get that job, the girl doesn’t call us back, or the market crashes, it’s our habitual programming that makes us upset—and the more we notice it the more space we can create and the less we suffer.

If we get sick, it still hurts—but the additional layer of “this shouldn’t be happening to ME” is buffered—to the extent that we begin to take in that “me” it shouldn’t be happening to exists only between our ears.

On the other hand, the conditioning that let our ancient ancestor determine that if it’s a lion, then run, which we sometimes call instinct, is also purely chemical – and it turns out that it’s also programming.

We now know that the DNA of all living organisms can be sequenced or decoded into a series of four letters, A, C, T and G that represent chemicals that interact a certain way under certain circumstances.

We are all running If/Then statements and i loops that we did not program. And it’s not just us—anything with DNA, which includes the simples organisms known, are interacting with the environment energetically according to instructions (code) that runs as a computer program.

It is only now, in our own evolution, with our own facility with language, logic and technology, that we have succeeded in creating primitive machines (in contrast to those found in nature) that can run code (software) that lets us interact with the program as a flow of intelligent energy.

I would propose that this is a pretty good start at defining consciousness—a flow of intelligent energy. We have created it “in our own image” as computer software. In nature, we call it Life.

We do know that at the quantum level, we have discovered that processes mysteriously occur in what seems a paradox—an electron can be both a wave or a particle, and it can seemingly be in two or more places at once—and the realization of its potential “state” is dependent on an observer—seemingly consciousness…

And — if we return our focus to the Jeopardy-programmed IBM computer, we know that it is running software programmed by a team of brilliant minds that created billions of these programming statements, using language, to calculate at immense speeds and appear to be almost human.

Again, the key component to this endeavor, which we’ve all experienced whenever we’ve used a computer or a smart phone is Mind. Someone thought of the program. A team of minds programmed the software.

Similarly if we consider deeply, how DNA and our own cells and organs interact with an environment according to concepts that we can decode linguistically, and ALL OF THIS was here presumably before any human had the ability to think, speak or use language – what does that suggest?

Especially when we look out into the heavens that we cannot intellectually fathom, or into the “inner space” of the brain which is just as vast, the sense of awe and reverence must arise that there is a far greater Mind somewhere else…

To speculate just a bit further—actually it’s a pretty large leap—what if it turned out that energy that we don’t begin to understand in the universe—such as dark matter or even black holes—were immense facilitators of the flow of an intelligent energy that we are just beginning to comprehend?

And perhaps, even within ourselves, in the midst of the many “I’s” and selves to which we haphazardly attribute our own identity, if we look deeply enough, another far more advanced level of mind is at work – life as a flow of intelligent energy.

It is not the “Us” we so often take ourselves to be. We encounter it infrequently—but it is a deeper energy that is far more intelligent than what we can put into words.

And again, interestingly, it is an energy of potential mental quality that even our current religion, Science, is just now coming to know and grudgingly acknowledge at both the quantum and galactic level.

 

Incognito: An Exploration of the Vastness of Inner Space

Let me start with an admission: I talk to myself. Out loud.

I’ve done it to goad myself, motivate myself and too often to criticize myself, and if I’m not careful, people can catch me doing it out in public.

I’ve lived alone for most of my life and I’m an only child, but the question has come up, who is speaking to whom?

In Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, neuroscientist David Eagleman uses this very example to raise a common question: who or what exactly is the “self” that one is always referring to? When I talk to my “self”, which self is speaking and which is listening?

In one of his videos Eckhart Tolle suggests that during meditation one follow any train of thought down the path of “Who Am I?” as a mantra, going deeper and deeper to try to locate who the “I” may be when we refer to the self during speech or thought.

Similarly the leader of my Eckhart Tolle group, Michael Jeffreys, has suggested that we literally scan our bodies to try to identify a specific location where this “I” resides.

When first confronted with this issue I suggested it may be in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which indeed neuroscientists consider the “Executive” area which seems to have some control over which of the many “selves” are active at any one time.

But Eagleman, a neuroscientist of some renown who recently appeared on Jon Stewart, doesn’t locate a single physical area of the brain that is “in charge.” On the contrary, most of his book compares the various areas of the brain and their “subroutines” (patterns of conditioned behavior) to political parties that ultimately lead to behavior based on conflict and compromise.

And the prefrontal cortex, which can give attention to a habit (overeating for example) and ultimately put a gap between a thought and an execution by observing thoughts effectively enough to intercept them (mindfulness), but Eagleman writes:

“But we do not find parts of the brain that is not itself driven by other parts of the network. Instead every part of the brain is densely connected with—and driven by—other brain parts. And that suggests that no part is independent and therefore ‘free.’” (Page 166)

The title—Incognito—literally means “with identity concealed.” He quotes from the lyrics by Pink Floyd to underscore the unknown identity of who or what we are: “There’s someone in my head but it’s not me.”

Eagleman uses examples of people with impaired or injured brains and also celebrities like Mel Gibson, who was “not himself” when drunk, and turned into a raging anti-Semite, and was conciliatory when sober.

The one area where this has far reaching ramifications is the law, and Eagleman suggests a legal system based not on blame, which he considers an outmoded concept, but rather on the prospects for modifiability—if we know a criminal will not repeat (act of passion) or can be rehabilitated (behavior modified) then one course of action can be taken, otherwise he suggests that the person obviously must be separated from society.

Eagleman compares the achievements in neuroscience to those in astronomy which challenged conventional beliefs about the earth at the center of the universe—in the case of the brain the notion of the single responsible and cohesive Self is exposed as a vast oversimplification of something much greater.

Again he writes, “in the same way that the cosmos is much larger than we ever imagined, we ourselves are something greater than we had intuited by introspection. We’re now getting the first glimpse of the vastness of inner space. .. What a perplexing masterpiece the brain is, and how lucky we are to be in a generation that has the technology and the will to turn our attention to it. It is the most wondrous thing in the universe, and it is us.”

I find this language both inspiring and a bit daunting—it is always humbling to confront the reality of the vastness of what we don’t know (yet) – and in fact may never know.

But I think that even as lay people we have a hint.

In a telling way Eagleman uses computer terminology throughout Incognito. I noted the use of the term “subroutine”, which is the same term programmers use for chunks of programming that perform a specific (habitual or repetitive) task, often triggered by a stimulus (mouse click).

And of course the entire brain itself is referred to as a vast network of interconnected cells that can even develop and grow (neuroplasticity).

What I’m suggesting here again is that our experience with our own technology, primitive as it may be in comparison to what Life itself has revealed to us as our own hardware and software — we do understand that the mental component and its level of intelligence can be programmed to exist and manifest its conceptual will within a human-created inanimate system (computer)—but only as a result of a large and powerful network of minds (programming team) creating the machine (“In Our Image” –I could not resist…)

In just this way our response to our findings both in what Eagleman calls the “vastness of inner space” as well as our discoveries of the macro universe (outer space) can appropriately first be awe and reverence—and then the inevitable expansion of our current religion (Science) to drop our prejudice against immaterial reality and intelligence (sometimes called Spirit) and being an earnest inquiry into reality that embraces both empiricism (science and experimentation) and awareness (sensory information that goes against “common sense”).

Perhaps the reverence for the immensity of what exists as opposed to what we currently think we are can be inspired by the following statistic in the opening pages of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, where Eagleman writes, “There are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.”

When you combine the implications of the “vastness of inner space” suggested in this comparison with the suppositions of quantum physics—that suggest that everything unfolds out of a potentiality that is not realized until an Observer/Mind/Consciousness perceives it.

So that just as it took a mind (programming team) to conceive of our primitive simulation of what nature has created in our own craniums, we can only imagine the level of Mind that must ultimately exist within us, and without us.