The Mother of All Memes

The graphic to the left shows The Mother of All Memes without her clothes on or with her clothes on, depending on which scientists you are prone to believe.

One would think that her children, poor little ole memes, could have a life of their own free from the tugs, pushes, and pulls of the gravity of scientific bloviation, hypothecation, and even pontification.

But not so, alas, all things are within the grasp of scientific thought-gravity so each and every lowly meme is pulled and tugged asunder, abroad, to, fro, ever looking for a home but always a captive somewhere somehow.

The tug of war begins between the competing camps concerning the likely mother of all memes, the mind and/or the brain.

That old tug of war started by the philosophers, but now pumped up with cosmic steroids by the quantum mechanics, those meme bags even Mr. Goodwrench bows down to.

In the beginning (cool meme huh?) there was dualism and monism gravity which pulled folks into the belief that mind is a non-physical component on the one hand, but pulled folks into the belief that mind is the result of purely material processes of the physical brain on the other hand:

Philosophy of mind is a branch of modern analytic philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e. the relationship of the mind to the body, is commonly seen as the central issue in philosophy of mind, although there are other issues concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to the physical body.

(Philosophy of Mind). Well now doesn't that make a meme a bit insecure, in as much as every meme has been told that it is:

a postulated unit of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena

(Wikipedia, Meme). One of the scientists, a meme maker of cosmic proportions in terms of causing gastric pains to the establishment scientists, one Roger Penrose, is constantly causing memetic gamma ray wars between factions within the 100 year meme war community.

He is a master at hiding from both sides of the meme grabbers, so he postulates that:

In my view the conscious brain does not act according to classical physics. It doesn’t even act according to conventional quantum mechanics. It acts according to a theory we don’t yet have.

(Discover, emphasis added). Oh my the man is saying we have had 100 years of psychotherapy but we do not know fundamentally what we are talking about?

The memes are shuddering. No, he is saying we work on faith in science some times. His new book deals with the faith of science and will ruffle feathers.

But he is saying we don't know how the mind works at the fundamental level, so we activate our science based upon what the mind does, not on what the mind is.

That is why this blog calls for a new approach based upon what the human species needs to do in order to survive, not what we need to do just to win silly arguments.

Shadow of Time Governs The Earth

Time is everywhere and there are different types of time.

Song writers mentioned that "time keeps on slipping slipping slipping into the future" in a popular song some time back.

The exclamation "just in time" indicates that only a portion of the vast amount of the totality of time is available for some efforts.

Time is another one of those invisible realms, like gravity, that governs the earth from "the shadows", that is, from the realm we cannot see even though we can see the effects of the unseen power at work.

Dredd Blog talks about a shadow that governs in the sense of a powerful unseen movement.

A movement that influences the national governments without there being any conspiracy involved.

And that is the sense of this post, a notion of vast unseen realms that govern the entire earth from the shadows.

That is, "govern" in the sense that no single nation can change what is going to happen globally to climate patterns.

(One example of that can be discerned in the discussion of the G8 Summit in a previous post on Dredd Blog.)

The graph above shows world population numbers increasing, thereby, adding to the problems the nations of the earth face; whether they want to face those problems or even can face those problems or not:

That's the simple idea at the heart of the warning from John Beddington, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, of a possible crisis in 2030.

Specifically, he points to research indicating that by 2030 "a whole series of events come together":

* ... population will rise from 6bn to 8bn (33%)
* Demand for food will increase by 50%
* Demand for water will increase by 30%
* Demand for energy will increase by 50%

He foresees each problem combining to create a "perfect storm" in which the whole is bigger, and more serious, than the sum of its parts.

(BBC News). Everyone, from the Mayan date 2012 watchers to the scientist quoted above, calculates something happening at a particular point in time.

What is really being said is that there are powerful energies at work in the shadows which we cannot seem to govern.

Instead, they seem to govern us, so the best we can do is watch the effects which we think will converge to have tangible results at a particular time.

But, that has not proven to be a timely indicator, because, scientists are as surprised as politicians are from time to time.

This does not bode well for the hope that the human species will pass "The Test" of Ecocosmolgy by conforming to the governing requirements of the cosmos.

The next post in this series is here.

No Need To Shoot In The Dark

Life After People

Imagine a large city on a planet near a star. A star that will be called a nova in a hundred years or less.

The SETI institute and NASA through its Kepler Mission are looking for planets that are, or can be, inhabited. Which means that they are looking near stars.

Some of which will go nova, or destroy the planets near them in another way.

Under current scientific models the stars which have planets near them will destroy those planets at some time. Our star, the Sun, will do so by expanding in size to a point out near the orbit of Mars.

Since we know that, it seems obvious that we will try to leave this planet to find another star with habitable planets. It seems obvious because if we do not do that, we cease to exist as a species.

We can assume that any other intelligent life species that wanted to continue to exist would do the same. They would try to find another home world.

I offer a search technique for consideration, which could fine tune the search Kepler and SETI are doing.

Look for signals from solar systems where the star has gone catastrophic, that is, has gone nova, super-nova, or has expanded out to destroy the planets near it like the Sun is going to to us. If there was any life on any planets there, the looming catastrophe may have caused signal transmission from any intelligent life there, well before the solar destruction.

But when we do the looking, we should look at the record of events before the catastrophe, we should also look back as many years before the catastrophe as possible, in cases where we have those astronomical records in our grasp.

For those systems where there were species who could not develop a way to do space travel to another planet, we might detect a signal for help.

And in those cases where the species could and did develop space travel, did find another star with a habitable planet, then did thereafter travel to it, we would expect a different signal to find its way toward us.

But remember that, in any search of this type, any signal will in most cases be older than our species, since great distances of space are involved.

Which involves great spans of time for signals to travel through, even at the speed of light.

Any signals received will be very, very old.