1

Psychological
Acts

Essays on the psychology of

the stranger places in the
lives of people throughout
their history living on a
solitary blue marble in space

By

A J Marr
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1 When the Elizabethans took over

2 Canned Hamlet

3 Barbarians at the Gate

4 The Colors of Affect

5 Jeff Bezos’ Cobblestone Hut

6 The Parable of the Squeaky Wheel

7 Virtuous Circuits

8 The Echoes of Genius

9 Gone in a Fortnite,

10 My Scandalous take on LBGTQ+

11 Racial Imperialism

12 The Powerball of death!

13 Calvinistic Culture

14 When Hollywood came to town

15 Supply chain gets torpedoed!

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16 On Trolls

17 Time Enough at Last!

18 When Aristotle got the internet

19 I am Spartacus!

20 Brain in a vat

21 Today the earth stood still

22 Achilles and the Turtle Soup

23 A Choice of Realities

24 Baby in the Well

25 The Bach Within

26 Base Instinct

27 Captain Kirk’s Explosive Question

28 The Conspiracy of the Books

29 John Crum
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30 Shakespeare in Laurel

31 Elven Psychology

32 Brain Boost

33 Idiot Savant

34 The Irish Problem

35 Kidney Consciousness

36 The Princess and the Pea

37 I Robot

38 Of Mice and Men

39 Mozart on the Barbie

40 On the Planet Nintendo: A Star Trek Fantasy

41 Socrates Hypo-critias

42 Walking the Planck

43 A Choice of Realities

44 This Disaster is brought to you by Krispy Crème

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45 The Elephant in the Living Room

46 Dreams of a Popperian Machine

47 The Email of Damocles

48 Finding Motivation in a Deck of Cards

49 Genghis Bush

50 Getting down to Business

51 Plato’s Garbage Pile

52 Procrastination and the Spell of Danger

53 Psychology goes Nova

54 Regression towards Meanness

55 Searching for Red Stockings, the myth of

Information

56 Overload

57 Shakespeare and the Turtle

58 Stalin’s Maxim
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59 A Sticky Medium

60 Tiger Woods vs. One Billion Monkeys

61 Utopia is Nowhere, thank goodness

62 Vespasian and the Machine

63 We can forget it for you wholesale

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When the Elizabethans took over

As history tells the tale, the old regime fell quickly, and
before you knew it there was a new ruler and a renewal of
the horrible status quo. Girls were sequestered, consigned
to domestic chores, and were not permitted to attend
school, and child marriages were the norm. The state
religion was supreme, taught and memorized in schools,
with hours of worship and daily scripture reading
mandated for all. Heretics were persecuted, modern
conveniences were unknown, and people on the whole
were unkempt, uncouth, and pretty dirty, and high
mortality for disease followed. Head chopping, hand
lopping, and being strung up on the nearest bridge was
acceptable justice. But the people, bored as they were, were
promised suitable entertainment with sex, violence, bawdy
humor, and iambic pentameter! Playhouses would be
erected across the land so the people could be entertained,
and keep an eye on! Life was great, comparatively speaking
for the times at least….But who were these horrible
miscreants, and would civilization stand for them?
Evidently, it did.
For these were the Elizabethans!
Returning civilization to the barbarous 16th century, just a
few hundred years ago, we would note that in that era we
had authoritarian rule, religious orthodoxy, a tolerance for
persecution and slavery, and a rather primitive civic and
people, and this was the English Renaissance as it were, a
relative boon to humanity given that past eras were far
worse. All of our renaissances were at root cruel and unjust
times, and if viewed from the lens of history, our
sensibilities would have all of their literary and physical
monuments torn to the ground, with legacies tarnished by
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our present-day standards of right and wrong. To focus on

history’s miseries rather than it’s grandeurs is to diminish
our inspiration to the dead hand of facts, and I for one
would celebrate an Elizabeth, Drake, and Shakespeare in a
different way, while keeping
in mind the harsher truths of life and why for flowers to
bloom, they need to sprout from common dung.

Bill Shakespeare, Cultural Minister

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Canned Hamlet
Communications, whether genetic or through common
speech, can have its rough spots when we are literally
without words; but nature, and human nature finds a way.
Consider cloning. If you have a dinosaur that you wish to
resurrect from the bone yard, it’s understandable that you
will likely have an incomplete DNA code. Never fear, for
you can use some handily available frog DNA to tie
together the missing DNA sequences. And we know how
that turned out! When nature’s code is broken, enterprising
humans can just add a few strands of genetic text, and
presto, you have dino replicas that just happen to replicate
like frogs, perfect specimens for your soon to open Jurassic
Park! The same thing applies to the fractured syntax of the
modern word, where complete sentences are becoming as
rare as the complete genome of a Triceratops. As we move
into the post-literate era when the printed word is replaced
by pictures, sound bites, and videos displayed on the
appendages of our little screens, we find that the DNA of
our common language is becoming more fractured than
ever, and we need frog like words and phrases to glue it all
together and connect the broken threads of our thought,
more or less. The one thing we can be sure of Is that this new
speak is multiplying like crazy, you know, like frogs, like,
you know what I mean?
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Ribbiting Conversationalist

Olde Speak vs. New Speak

HAMLET (olde speak HAMLET (new speak)

)
To be, or not to be? That is the question—
To be or not to be? You know what I mean?

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer Like whether its noble in the mind to
hurt real bad

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, The slings and arrows of bad luck,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, or just get all riled up against all this
awful stuff

And, by opposing, end them? To die, to sleep or just being, you know, stubborn,
or to
off myself

No more—and by a sleep to say we end Like, just to doze off, you know what
I’m sayin?

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks What a headache, and like, its
throbbing

That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation I’m achy all over.

Devoutly to be wished! To die, to sleep. I wish I was dead, or conk out

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub, Or just doze off and enter dreamland,
but like,

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come What about my dreams, know what
I
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mean?
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Like, when we’re really dead, and
haunting stuff
Must give us pause. There’s the respect Give me a break, like, I’m really
thinking
That makes calamity of so long life. And living long is a pain, know what
I’m sayin?
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Barbarians at the Gate

It’s easy for us to conceive of the fall of empires. Born in
hubris, and often ending because of it, waning civilizations
are generally conceived to be innervated to luxury, have
poor governance, and are careless of defense, easy pickings
to up and coming invaders. That’s the Roman Empire for
you, and its decline and fall, or its western half at least, was
a comeuppance to its faults, where the barbarians merely
giving its teetering edifice a push.
Still, we bemoan what Rome’s fall cost, a seat of learning, of
law, and in spite of its excesses, at least the chariots ran on
time. The Romans were simply overwhelmed by a wave of
migrants that pushed aside fortified boundaries, defeated
the legions, and simply ransacked the place.
Well, not exactly.
If anything, the opening of the great American west is a
better metaphor. The barbarians were just tribes of folks
trekking out west with their families and wagons, looking
for good homesteads and peace with the much more
numerous natives, and if they caused a bit of chaos and
rapine here and there, it came with the territory. Their
numbers told the tale. Barbarian tribes were never more
than a small percentage of the native population. For
example, the Ostrogoths and Visigoth tribes number no
more than one hundred thousand apiece, the Burgundians
twenty-five thousand, and the Vandals eighty thousand,
hardly enough to disturb commerce and the arts, and
certainly not to keep the common language from straying
from Romance.
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Barbarians at the checkout gate

The barbarians of old, like the western pioneers, were not

liberators or conquerors, but they were libertarians, and the
Roman population, crushed by onerous taxation and
regulation, for the most part welcomed this release from
misgovernance. Of course, freedom is but a few degrees
removed from anarchy, and eventually the common people
made deals with the more powerful among them to trade
protection for a cut of the harvest. A decent enough trade,
given what came before. And so feudal kingdoms gradually
arose from a dark ages that presaged the barbarians long
before they arrived. Still, one must wonder. If dark age
sensibilities were replaced by new age sensibilities, would
the world have been a nicer place? The barbarians would
keep within their borders, refrain from invading other
places and wanton nation building, and would trade with
the Romans and even share with them burgeoning Teutonic
wealth and technology. The Romans peace would endure,
and so would the Roman rot, and misrule would be ossified
and passed down from generation to generation, with
poverty and misery a common fate, and refugees
periodically flooding into peaceful Germania, a societal
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wasteland that outsiders would call peace. The alternative

is not inviting, given that dark ages happened anyways, and
to consider it nowadays is simply unthinkable. After all, to
cauterize a festering civilization by iron and fire, no matter
the eventual healing, would simply be barbarous.
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The Colors of Affect

The colors of the rainbow do not begin to reflect all of the
infinite hues of reflected light. However, the myriad colors
of the world are not separate things, but are in truth
admixtures of three primary colors, red, yellow, and blue.
This simple conceptual scheme provided the explanation of
color that made the replication of color easy, to the delight
no doubt of interior decorators the world over. Deriving
complex structure from elemental processes serves all the
physical and biological sciences, and like the metaphors of
disease and space and time, can encapsulate a world view
in a phrase. However, feelings or affective states have not
been so tractable, though an early psychologist would
demur. He was the late 19th century psychologist Wilhelm
Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology. Wundt
wanted to know the rudiments of felt experience, or affect,
and his aim was to see if affect, like color, can be derived
from rudimentary components. Wundt believed that the
affective components of the human mind could be
determined by rigorously objective introspection. That is,
he thought that affect or feelings could be broken down (or
reduced) to their basic elements without sacrificing any of
the properties of the whole. Wundt’s introspection was not
a casual affair, but a highly practiced form of self-
examination. He trained his students to make observations
that were free from the bias of personal interpretation or
previous experience, and used the results to develop a
theory of affect which derived from three bi-polar
dimensions. According to Wundt: “In this manifold of
feelings… it is nevertheless possible to distinguish certain
different chief directions, including certain affective
opposites of predominant character.”
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The Affective Circumplex

Wundt identified three bipolar dimensions whose

permutations comprised moment to moment affective
states: (i) pleasurable versus un-pleasurable, (ii) arousing
versus subduing, and (iii) strain versus relaxation. An
attentive reader would note that strain versus relaxation
also reflect unpleasant and pleasant affective states,
however these states differ from our workaday pleasures
and pains because they are continuously rather than
intermittently present. So, with this new perspective,
Wundt in effect postulated one discrete and two continuous
affective dimensions. For example, a delicious meal or
touching a hot pan are pleasurable and unpleasurable states
that occur discretely, however the relative activity of the
covert musculature is continuous, as is our moment-to-
moment state of alertness, or attentive arousal.
What Wundt did not know and could not know at the time
due to the rudimentary observational tools then available
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was the source of arousal and pleasure, which are

respectively due to the activity of mid-brain dopaminergic
and opioid systems. The neuromodulator dopamine elicits
a feeling of alertness and energy, but not pleasure, and is
induced through the experience and anticipation of novel
positive events. On the other hand, opioids are responsible
for pleasure, and are elicited in very small regions or ‘hot
spots’ in the brain by exteroceptive (food, drink) and
interoceptive stimuli (relaxation). Finally, arousal and
pleasure are not just complementary but synergistic. In
other words, pleasure stimulates arousal, and arousal
stimulates pleasure. This reflects the fact that the neuronal
assemblies or nuclei that induce dopaminergic and opioid
activity abut each other in the midbrain, and when
individually activated can have synergistic effects, or
dopamine-opioid interactions. This can explain why high
arousal and pleasure, or ecstatic, peak, or ‘flow’
experiences, correspond to novel and ‘meaningful’
experiences during relaxed states. If we map the continuous
affective dimensions of Wundt’s proposal to each other,
when informed by affective neuroscience, Wundt’s color
wheel can bloom, and account for and predict different
affective states. The vertical axis would represent
dopaminergic activity, from high to low, whereas the
horizontal axis would represent the degree of covert neuro-
muscular activation, or muscular tension, again from high
to low. High arousal would be felt as a sense of energy or
alertness, and low arousal would be felt as a sense of
lethargy or depression. High tension would be felt as
anxiety or nervousness, and low tension would be felt as a
pleasurable state of calm or relaxation. Mapping these
affective events to their physiological correlates gives us
emergent subjective states that match the emotional labels
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of our affective wheel, or an ‘emotional circumplex’. Thus

‘elation’, or a state of pleasure and arousal would occur
when arousal is high and tension is low, ‘frustration’ would
reflect high arousal and high tension, ‘worry’ would reflect
low arousal and high tension, and ‘relaxation’ would
correspond to low arousal and low tension. And so with a
little tinkering of Wundt’s proposal, his observations are
correct after all, and perhaps as the affective wheel turns can
help psychologists arrange the colors of emotion in ways
that would do interior decorators of the soul proud.
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Jeff Bezos’ Cobblestone Hut

Jeff Bezos in better times

We get jealous easily, and a simple trend line can set us off
in the worst way. Take income inequality for example. It
seems that the top 1% of earners are well on their way to
owning 99% of the world’s wealth, and that can’t be a good
thing, comparatively speaking that is. We tend to see the
uber rich as real-life incarnations of Scrooge McDuck, with
a yacht the size of the Titanic, a country estate as large as
Epcot, and a vault with gold coins a mile down and a mile
wide where they can take a daily swim. It’s all about
contrasting our stuff with their stuff, and it is the imagery
that really counts. That the rich recklessly spend much of
their money, while reserving the rest in boundless and inert
pools of cash is a neat image, and can be solved in two ways.
One is by taking their toys away from them, or two, by
taking the money that they use to buy their toys. The latter
solution is the familiar tax the rich gambit, where the rich
pay their fair share to the government, like nearly all of it.
The former solution, which I prefer, is to take the toys away,
and restrict them to living in modest cobblestone huts, take
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simple vacations in the Ozarks, and paddle only in canoe

sized yachts. They get to keep their gotten gains, whether ill
or not, and no vault diving allowed! The issue is that even
if a Bezos like character gets his rocket liner, private island,
and mega-yacht replaced by a cobblestone hut, 1956
Volkswagen, and a canoe, in either case he is only spending
a fraction of his wealth. The rest of it is not in some
bottomless money pit, but in the business enterprise that
coined them their gold. We would be just fine with
capitalists who were more in line with Bob Cratchit than
Ebenezer Scrooge, but either way the real question is
whether individual or social goods are the most important.
It is this tension between private and government spending,
or between individual and societal goods that is most
important, and this is apportioned between all individuals
and ultimately transcends mere envy. As for the jealousy
part, that’s something we just can’t help, however a
cobblestone equity act is something we can all buy into,
while keeping us comfortable when we buy into Amazon
stock, whether it is denominated in tender vittles or tender
offerings, whose relative virtues will be always debated.
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Virtuous Circuits
Our pleasures don’t just happen, they take calibration.
Context is important, and novel and positive expectation is
the seasoning that enhances the pleasures of life. Take
movie theater popcorn for example. We don’t buy the stuff
to complement our viewing experience but to accentuate it.
We save the best gulps for the best emotional gulps, and
reserve the pleasure for the novel expectancy, or in
cinematic terms, the most exciting moments. For our daily
pleasures, the routine is the same, as we consciously or non-
consciously pair attentive arousal with pleasure, and make
sure that our daily bread is always accompanied by a virtual
circus, as in good conversation, a good movie, or a good
internet link.Our pleasure adds to our interest, and our
interest add to our pleasure. This is a metaphorical virtuous
circuit, where different elements of experiences are
synergistic, and multiply rather than merely add to each
other. This emotional circuit can be seen across all
experience that has pleasure and arousal as components,
from food and drink to even our workaday lives. For
example, when we are pleasurably relaxed, performing or
anticipating the imminent prospect of activity that has
meaning and has meaningful entailments is associated with
enhance pleasure and arousal. The latter perplexes us, and
we have different names for it, from flow and peak
experiences to work satisfaction, and different metaphorical
explanations too, from brain waves to consciousness
raising. Thankfully, however, emotional circuits have their
neurological equivalent. Indeed, the neurons or brain cells
that produce the neurochemicals that are responsible for
pleasure, or opioid systems, are in the same mid-brain
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location as those that increase our interest or attention, or

dopamine systems. When either system is activated, the
other is activated too, and when both are, then our
emotional reaction due to this virtuous circuit can be quite
literally ecstatic, demonstrating how a metaphorical circuits
can indeed have a neurological flip side. But metaphorical
circuits, even when the neurological equivalent is obscured
or denied, are ultimately justified by pragmatism, of ‘folk’
wisdom for just us folks. So, if you want to be happy and
ecstatic, in addition to knowing how your bread is buttered
and where to eat it, know also that to avoid distraction and
achieving a sense of calm, that anticipating and engaging in
meaningful activity is the best route to happiness.

When sensations collide!

These observations were confirmed by recent experiments

by Rauwolf and colleagues, who demonstrated that reward
uncertainties do indeed increase the reported pleasure of
food and drink, and by implication that any contextual cues,
from a well worded menu to the ambience of an expensive
restaurant lead to high expectations and greater pleasure in
our dining experiences, as we know at least non-consciously
already.
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Rauwolf P, Millard SK, Wong N, Witt A, Davies TJ, Cahill

AM, Madden GJ, Parkinson JA, Rogers RD. (2021) "Just not
knowing" can make life sweeter (and saltier): Reward
uncertainty alters the sensory experience and consumption
of palatable food and drinks. Journal Experimental Psychology
General, much more on the neuropsychology of happiness
and motivation and my little happiness procedure on
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Antonio Salieri, Homer Simpson,

and the Echoes of Genius
In the movie 'Amadeus' the aged composer Salieri
despaired that his once exalted reputation had vanished,
with scarcely anyone playing his music, while that vulgar
twit Mozart was getting all the attention, and quite literally,
the last laugh. Of course, in Salieri's prime he received the
best press, the best jobs, the highest laurels, and the ear of a
tone-deaf emperor, but ultimately it didn't matter because
no one cared. Similarly, consider the legacy of the writers
Norman Mailer and William Styron. Lionized by the
literary elite, feted with publicity and prizes, their legacy
likewise faded with their years, so that almost no one reads
them anymore, while a vulgar twit named Kurt Vonnegut
gets the attention, the readers, and the last laugh.

Every donut has meaning

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Ultimately, the argument of who is better or right is

irrelevant if no one pays attention. Like a tree falling in the
forest, does an argument matter if it isn't heard? The
celebrated debates in philosophy and psychology are mere
footnotes in our collective memory, not because they have
been settled, but because no one cares. As I read the
umpteenth argument for or against
evolutionary/freudian/behavioristic psychology,
arguments full of storm and fury and torturous logic, I
know as well that they are significant to next to no one. This
is because their authors do not consider the simple fact that
people do not ponder the meaning of existence or their
behavior as much as the meaning of that doughnut they ate
this morning. But does this mean that the only philosophy
that matters is written by Homer Simpson? Not really, but
it does mean that you need to include a little Homer
Simpson in your heroic and immortal prose. That is, to
convince people, you must first engage them, and
philosophies that are immortally beloved must not only mix
high logic with high art, but also carry a good tune. That
right dose of hummable vulgarity imbues a Mozartean or
Shakespearean quality that makes the logic go down, and
as Kurt Vonnegut likely knows now, an echo in eternity that
even God will take pause to listen.
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Gone in a Fortnite, the Rise of

Junk Culture

Recently, a 13-year-old kid wins a Fortnite Cup after

spending entire half of his waking life for the last two years
playing the video game on line. Think about that. In his
room, passing the day and evening along with 150 million
others virtually running around in circles. My modest
opinion on this?
We are all doomed.

Fortnite for Hamsters

In the past, spending eight hours a day doing anything

meant you were doing something that assuredly made you
healthier, wealthier, or wise. In 1955, spending most of your
day playing ball, practicing piano, socializing with friends,
or just thinking about the universe got you somewhere.
Now the only thing our entertainments provide is good
muscle memory. Meanwhile, social skills, intellect, and
muscle mass rot, literacy falls, obesity rises, and our body
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politic is expressed on twitter feeds. This is beyond

argument, just follow the trend lines and it is easy to see
how our society is barreling off a cliff.
Before the industrial revolution, the concern of our
ancestors was the lack of calories, now our concern is with
empty calories. For culture, the trend is the same. I guess we
are chimps after all, with evolved brains that allow us to
understand the world when not otherwise distracted by
bright and shiny objects, which are getting brighter and
shinier by the hour.
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My Scandalous take on LBGTQ+

I don’t care. Not interested. No opinion. Don’t want to talk
about it. And I think nearly all folks feel the same way.
Private sexual behavior is to no one’s interest, just as no one
cares what our neighbors eat, drink, or mumble in private.
It is none of our business, and we don’t care. In fact, even
the settings that are the exclusive province of private
behavior have an equal disinterest in popular culture. I am
not talking about bedrooms, but bathrooms. Name one
genre in popular entertainment that even mentions
bathrooms, let alone make them a setting for a dramatis
personae! Indeed, no one has to go, or excuse themselves to
go, or even seem to need to go in any of the media of
popular culture from tic tock videos to videos on IMAX.
Does that mean that we abhor natural bodily functions and
the places we employ them? Nope, it just means that we
don’t care. So private behavior is to no one’s interest, so why
are the sexual minority, and I’m talking about 5% of the
population here, so riled up about it? It’s because private
behavior once revealed can encourage public prejudice, but
how do you separate prejudice from simple judgment? I
would argue that it is not prejudice, but preference that is
the predominant issue here, yet finding prejudice
everywhere is a good way of avoiding responsibility for
other reasons why people don’t like you, such as a lack of
talent, personality, or drive. Indeed, while improving your
own shortcomings, why not share your pain by improving
the shortcomings of others, who have to suffer along with
you with reeducation, affirmative action, and listening to
you whine? Grievance after all is now an industry, and
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grievance can produce counter grievance which is confirms

this silly business in a vicious circle.
As for the representation of alternative sexual lifestyles, we
avoid it because we’re just not in to it. That Civil War
dalliance between Scarlett and Melanie died on the vine
because the public, by and large, did not care.
Heterosexuals could care less about the sexuality of their
stars, but for romance, just give them Cark Gable and Vivian
Leigh every time.

An affair to not remember

As for the rest, frankly, I don’t give a damn.

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Racial Imperialism, from

Octoroons to Macaroons

Yummy macaroons, no matter the color!

The census bureau has made much of the decline of

Caucasian Americans as a percentage of the American
population, a literally shady proposition if you ignore a
little shade that is. You see, if you are Caucasian, or a white
folk, you can be a card-carrying member of another race by
just jiggling your genetics a little. So if one of your parents
was black, then you can be black too, and the same goes if
one of your grandparents were black, or if one of your great
grandparents were black. The same goes for any ethnicity,
so one can easily recategorize themselves as native
American, Latino, or even Italian by just a nostalgic trip to
Ancestry dot com. So even if your ancestor was an Inuit
woman who had an affair with the Viking Leif Erikson in
1010 AD, you can qualify as a native American and get lots
of affirmative action perks and assorted deference. (Just ask
Senator Elizabeth Warren, who claimed American Indian
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status for the Texas state bar in 1986, though her DNA test
suggested a possible native American ancestor ten
generations ago) Racial reclassification can be a great thing
because then you have a new social distinction to rally
behind, which you can use to get a leg up in social status
when you argue that your new status hasn’t given you a leg
to stand on due to all that awful past discrimination. It is an
even better thing when you are re-classified by default, thus
obscuring or even canceling out your ancestry from other
races. This is an awful thing for us shrinking white folk, as
we will disappear in a generation or two the way things are
going. But this is merely a legalistic vanishing act, due to
what I would call racial imperialism. I would suggest no
racist solution of course, but a racial one is certainly in the
cards. In the past, individuals who were half black were
called mulattos, quarter black were quadroons, and one-
eighth black were octoroons. Let’s bring that back, along
with similar distinctions for the different blends of people
that are produced every day by this great American melting
pot. With this new trend, in the future we will have entirely
new classes of people who have their own reserved slice of
recognition, preference, social justice, affirmations,
reparations, or just plain guaranteed fifteen minutes of
fame, on the hour every hour that is. We can have all sorts
of new racial distinctions like macaroons, buffoons, and
loony toons to keep us distracted, persecuted, and busy on
our twitter, Facebook, and other social feeds all day. And
maybe then we can see the nonsense in all of this and
recognize that we are all under the hood just people after
all.
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The Powerball of Death!

Congrats! You’re dead!

Why Vaccine Hesitancy has to do with how we process

novelty Let’s say the government, in its usual ineffable
wisdom, mandates that everybody has to buy a Powerball
ticket, with the winner getting killed. And it also mandates
that everybody go to work the next day, as usual. For the
first option, even though the odds of getting the lethal
Powerball number are astronomical, the entire nation
would be consumed with worry, and stay up late until the
drawing before releasing a huge sigh of relief, except for
one. And the next day, they obey the mandate to show up
for work without a thought, even though it is much likely
that the daily commute will kill you. For the daily commute,
we not only know the odds, but experience has caused us to
ignore them. For the lottery ticket, there are no lessons from
experience, unless of course the government continues its
daily lottery mandate, in which case we would learn to
ignore it as blithely as the dangers of our daily commute.
This is why we are fine with universally imposed
vaccinations for measles, polio, and other dangerous
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diseases, and be a bit upset with a Covid shot, conflating a

vaccination shot with being shot dead. It has nothing to do
with being smart or dumb, liberal or conservative,
Republican or Democrat. It is just that we are uncomfortable
or comfortable with the odds of new things, depending
upon the outcome. So if you want to get comfortable with
the odds of life, it pays to just get on with living
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Calvinistic Culture

All is forgiven. NOT!

Our cultural gods proclaim, as usual, that sin is everywhere,

but it’s not so much in the obvious places, but in the virtual
ones. Violence to persons has morphed into violence to
personal sensibilities, and we take affront and seek
vengeance for all of those wayward thoughts that folks have
graciously time stamped on social media, and are ripe for
discovery given a google search or two. And for our sins no
one will indulge us, which is bad news to the more Catholic
tradition that has economically morphed from buying
indulgences to granting them wholesale for a hail Mary or
two. With a few prayers, a private confession, and a public
apology or two, you would be forgiven and ready to go. Not
anymore. Presently a social Calvinism has replaced the
confessional, and you can still repent, but only on the pyre,
as your reputation and livelihood goes up in flames, and
banned on Facebook and twitter, you are never heard from
again. Its predestination writ large in social media,
recording not only all we do and have been through, but our
ancestors as well. That’s a lot of personal and generational
guilt to carry about, though you may repent, your fate is still
sealed. But God knows, you had it coming!
 35

When Hollywood came to town

Send in the clones!

Suppose when cloning becomes the norm, an enterprising

biologist with an eye to entertainment will clone three icons
of Hollywood, Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and Jimmy
Stewart, along with William Shakespeare for dramatic
support. Anticipating high demand, he will make 10,000
copies of them. Naturally, modern day Hollywood would
only take a few sets of these folks, with the rest distributed
to towns across the land where they will spend their
evenings putting on shows at the local little theater, with
newly scripted plays by Bill Shakespeare such as ‘Romeo
and Ethyl, the Pirate’s Daughter’. This of course would
revive the local theater scene, and give lots of inspiration for
other playwrights, actors, and supporting crews. In this
case, high quality will stimulate high demand, but does
high demand stimulate high quality? In economics, this
works not just for burgers and cars, but for artistry as well.
As history attests, you can be sure of it. All of the
renaissances in history were provincial affairs, supported
by the local citizenry who in eras where entertainment had
 36

to be home grown, turned to local talent, and created the

local venues where it could be encouraged. And so were
created the Athenian amphitheater, the Globe and Rose
theatres in Shakespearean London, and Vienna opera house
in Mozart’s day. And with high demand, genius soon
followed, and with it a supporting cast that would put envy
in our trio of stars. Genius by nature is a rare thing, and to
get there you must make demand universal where a
thousand flowers must bloom before a single rose amongst
them stands tall. And to do it you need not a faraway
factory farm but a local pasture, well tilled, and with an
encouragement to flower.
 37

Supply Chain gets Torpedoed!

Teletubby shipment get torpedoed!

There was trouble with our goods, because there were no

goods. But the American people were prepared for it, and
scarcely complained. Supply chains were disrupted or
nonexistent. Strawberries could be had only a few months
in the year, and from fruits and vegetables to chickens,
everything else had to be grown locally. Handicrafts and do
it yourself was making do, and clothes were assembled
from sewing patterns and sewing machines. Only a few
types of imported goods were at the local store, and even
Heinz had only 5.7 varieties. People stayed put, and even
flying cost a month’s wages. Kids made their own toys from
cardboard boxes, string, and a hefty dose of imagination.
And life was good. And where was the global supply chain?
Well, at this time much of it was lying at the bottom of the
sea. It was 1950, and you could blame World War 2 or a
rudimentary logistics grid, but there was no real scarcity of
goods, just a massive reduction in choice, relative to the
 38

future that is. But since memory served up even worse

times, there was no complaint everything from ice cream to
cars came in only a few varieties. If memory does not serve
up contrasts to better times, present times can hardly be
worse, and in essence they really aren’t if we use our
varietal ingenuity to make variety out of pieces of
cardboard and balls of string. And in that regard, this black
and white era had the most bountiful and diverse goods of
all, virtually served up by that most versatile of devices, our
human imagination.
 39

On Trolls

Uninvited Visitors

We are living in a world where not only nature, but human

nature is being highly inconsiderate. And we are as
troubled as we are enticed about trivial things being the
rage, but figuratively and literally. So, what else is new? It’s
not that polite discourse has declined, it is that the wreckage
of discourse, like a car wreck, commands attention, interest,
and outrage. Added to the fact we can broadcast our rage to
everyone, and so it seems that the whole world is riveted by
verbal carnage. My mean letter and the meaner response
from my angry correspondence to my water
department/best friend/lawyer in 1950 wouldn’t make the
back page of the local gazette, now however it can be posted
for all the world to see. A distracting and painful trend to
be sure. Yet it can all be corrected if we invest in a
metaphorical screen door, which for the most part we do.
We just have to install a few more doors. Shall I explain? If
everyone it seems is looking out to see you coming, at least
you should look out to see them coming, and that includes
 40

all creatures big or small that in principle instinctively

advance their own interest before your own. To
demonstrate this, open your household door, and all sorts
of visitors both benign and malign will enter, from the six
legged and four-legged kind to the two legged one. Open
our virtual doors, and the result is the same, and we always
remember the mess our visitors leave, rather than the beds
they made. As for our normal lives, we have screen doors
for the physical intruders, and internet screening for the
virtual ones, so that on line trolls are consigned to junk
email and are deleted immediately, and if they command
your attention, their name and identify is on the command
line for us to make sure. You are the gatekeeper after all,
and whether you are at home or are virtually at home, it is
up to you who you admit to your attention and those who
truly have something to say. A hard task to do, to avoid the
train wrecks of common discourse on the internet and
common media that invariably make it as noxious
comments to your social network feed, but such is our own
weakness, as avoiding the plague means to avoid others
who may carry the plague as well as those who merely have
an infectious personality. But the alternative is the real and
virtual diminution of the species, which we must ultimately
strive to avoid, like the plague.
 41

Time Enough at Last!

If you wait long enough, things just blow over, or just get
blown up, and you can settle back to a life of leisure where
you can do all the things you wanted to do. The irony of
retirement is that even when things get blown up, leaving
you all alone with your books and endless cans of beans,
you need to have something stashed away, like an extra pair
of eyeglasses. In a classic episode of the original Twilight
Zone series, that was the problem with a Henry Bemis, a
mild-mannered bank clerk with a penchant for reading
books, anywhere, and all the time. His shrewish wife
hounded him, tore up his book of poetry, and not
appreciated by a culture that scorned the written word,
retired to a bank vault to read in solitude. Then the H Bomb
hit. Disoriented at first, but upon finding conveniently
irradiated food and the wreck of the public library with its
books intact, solitude became a godsend. He arranges the
books in literary gallery, and bending over to read the first
book, trips and smashes his glasses, his hopes consigned to
oblivion and him to despair. For myself, in my retirement
years, I will lay out all of the thousand books in my personal
library to read at my leisure, keep to my own solitude with
 42

Shakespeare and Dickens as company, and scribble my own

books to satisfy my own personal muse. I will keep two
pairs of reading glasses of course. And soon enough, I’m
dead, all is oblivion. Goes to show, there’s never time
enough. As a side note: In ‘The Scary Door’, a show-within-
a-show on Futurama parodying The Twilight Zone, pokes
fun at the final twist in "Time Enough at Last". When the
man in the episode loses his glasses, he realizes he can still
read large print since his eyesight is not as bad as he
perceived; his eyes fall out, but he declares he can read
Braille; his hands fall off, and as he screams, his tongue falls
out and then his head falls off. Bender comments, "Cursed
by his own hubris."
 43

When Aristotle got the

internet
Aristotle got the internet the other day, as well as the whole
ancient world. The classical Greeks immediately took
advantage of this science fiction chicanery, and in what
would seem in a fortnight used this portal to use all the
knowledge of the world to take command of the world,
economically that is. After all, why take over the Celts when
even when armed with universal knowledge they have not
the wits to make even a decent Celt phone? Better to make
and sell them scads of them instead. And so Aristotle, Plato,
and the the lot of the academy and the hyper-competitive
Greek city states bootstrapped themselves to lord over the
world, while the barbarians merely squabbled, mired in
poverty and tribal misgovernment. The Greeks became the
new one percenters, owning just about everything, and they
did so not because they had exclusive ownership of
knowledge, which they did not, but because their society
was hyper-incentivized to use and expand that knowledge.

The original 1 percenter

 44

Nowadays, with the internet, knowledge is universal and

free, and one can learn to fish, build a home, treat a cold,
program a computer, or build a nuclear reactor. Its all there,
waiting only for incentive. The maddening thing about the
current complaints about unequal distribution of wealth or
income is that it is a description of the symptom, not the
disease. Rather it is the unequal distribution of incentive as
mediated by societal, cultural, and governmental norms
that is holding us back. Just ask the ancient Greeks, who in
their relative poverty, were the true one percenters in the
ancient world, attained not just by their possession of
knowledge but by the incentive to acquire more of it, use it,
and in their peerless gift to humanity, to be among the first
to attempt to explain the world.
 45

I am Spartacus!
Its 71 BC, and the Romans just rounded up the last of those
pesky gladiator rebels led by Spartacus, that mean spirited
troll who said and did many nasty things to the Romans.
Naturally, they were very ‘cross’ with him, and not having
a proper photo ID, asked the real Spartacus to stand up and
apologize. All of the captives summarily rose up and said
they were Spartacus. Apology accepted, and then they were
crucified anyways, with their crosses lining the Appian
way.
Speed forward to the present day, and if you are a rebellious
troll who said something nasty sometime in your pitiful life,
you too will be crucified, virtually that is, and your career,
reputation, and YouTube spot will be burned to the ground,
apology not accepted. The PC radar is unerringly precise,
something the Roman’s sadly lacked, and the only way to
get around it is to jam it, so that when a google search looks
for your faux pas, it will discover everybody’s, who like all
the faux Spartacus’ of yesteryear, have to be crucified. Well,
I for one am all in, and hereby found the ‘I am Spartacus’
movement for social justice and collective social suicide.
 46

To join the ‘I am Spartacus’ movement, each of us should

place the follow phrase in their social media feed. Just say ‘I
hate: blacks, transexuals, republicans, jews, Brazilians,
Atlanta Falcons fans, or anybody from San Francisco', or
you name it. Lather up and do this once a day. Soon the PC
radar will be jammed with millions of malefactors who will
soon have a cross to bear, which believe me, is a whole lot
better than having to put up with this cancel culture
nonsense for another minute.
 47

Brain in a Vat
If there is one thing that mad scientists are attracted to for
personal edification, the advancement of knowledge, and of
course, taking over the world, it is ‘brains’. The best way to
study them, at least when you give credence to science
fiction and horror genres, is to detach them from their
bodies, put them in a nutrient filled vat, and connect them
to all sorts of probes that measure the electrical to and fro of
brain waves, or excite and depress brain cells to manipulate
what the brain thinks and feels. By detaching brains from
bodies, this sadly resulted in creations that were more akin
to Frankenstein than Einstein, a problem that was remedied
by the local gendarmes and lots of aroused peasants with
pitchforks and torches. And that’s entertainment!
Now fast forward to real brains and the not so mad
scientists that study them. For affective and cognitive
neuroscientists, brain imaging (fmri) and ‘in vivo’ or direct
stimulation of cellular arrays in the brain are the primary
methods to understand how affect is instantiated in the
brain, yet cannot account for how neuro-muscular stimuli
modulate affect. In other words, the afferent or direct input
from the musculature is neglected because of limitations of
the observational tools that neuroscientists use, thus
effectively making the brain virtually if not literally
detached from the body, or disembodied. But neglect is not
a research strategy, and impedes the explanatory power of
neuroscience. The result does not quite make for
Frankenstein, but models of the mind that are more akin to
Frankenstein, who was not exactly a true model of a mind.
 48

So what’s neglected?
A trifling matter of proprioception.
So, what’s a proprioceptor?
Proprioceptors (sensory receptors) are located in our
muscles and joints and respond to changes in the relative
activity of the overt and covert musculature. They also
induce changes in affective states in the brain. An example
of this is how we experience pleasure. Unlike other
functions in the brain, from perception to thinking, the
neural source of our pleasures are localized in the brain as
specialized groups of nerve cells or ‘nuclei’, or ‘hot spots’,
located in the midbrain. These nuclei receive inputs from
different sources in the nervous system, from
proprioceptive stimuli (neuro-muscular activity) to
exteroceptive (sensory stimuli: sight, sound, touch) and
interoceptive stimuli (satiation and deprivation and
associated visceral input) to cognitive stimuli (novel
positive or negative means-end expectancies), and all
modulate the activity of these nuclei which release or inhibit
endogenous opioids that embody the rainbow of pleasures
which mark our day.
For example, relaxation induces opioid activity and is
pleasurable, but tension inhibits it and is painful. Similarly,
 49

satiation inhibits our pleasure when we eat, and deprivation

or hunger increases it. Finally, positive novel means-ends
expectancies enhance our pleasures, and negative
expectancies inhibit them. It is this interleaving of
proprioception, interception, and cognition that makes our
affective world go round. Thus, for our sensory pleasures
(eating, drinking), watching an exciting movie makes
popcorn taste better than when watching a dull or
depressing movie. This also applies to when we are relaxed,
as thinking or performing meaningful activity is reflected in
pleasurable ‘flow’ or ‘peak’ experiences when we are
engaging in highly meaningful behavior while relaxed.
(Meaning will be defined as anticipated or current behavior
that has branching novel positive implications, such as
creating art, doing good deeds or productive work). Thus
if we are tense, we find our pleasures are reduced, and if we
are relaxed, they are enhanced, and these affective states are
modulated in turn by abstract properties of cognition. That
is, our pleasures are highly dependent not only upon how
we think but how our bodies overtly and covertly ‘move’,
and by depriving a brain of a body, we cannot fully
understand or maximize our pleasures, which can get one a
bit grumpy and prone to overturn apple carts. You know,
like Frankenstein.
(authors note: this is not to say that neuroscientists deny the
influence of bodily or somatic feedback, but rather than the
procedures they use are not capable of studying it, and that
it is not factored in explanations of motivation as well as
specific affective states, such as meditation, which are
explained and studied without consideration of neuro-
muscular input and how it modulates affect)
 50

Today, the Earth Stood

Still
In 1951, the aliens had a better idea towards war.
Decapitate the aggressor, kill him.
And it would be automatic, robotic.
Built into the system like an antivirus program in a
computer.
Burning the aggressor to a cinder is one way, and if the
aggressor is one individual, you could target and kill him.
With the precision arms we have now, it would have been
easy to take out a Stalin, Hitler, or Mao with a missile strike.
It would be just as easy to take out Putin, if not for the
nuclear button.
It is a reasonable solution when the aggressor has no nuclear
armament, and one the free world must consider.
In not, when one of those flying saucers circling the globe
lands, we know what they will likely say, and nuclear
button would be no deterrent.

What the world needs now, is Gort, sweet Gort!

 51

Achilles and the Turtle Soup

Or why halfway getting there is all the fun.
A simple fact not normally understood is that most of our
thought is not literal but metaphorical. That is, we
understand much of our world through images or pictures
that when combined into metaphors become the aphorisms,
maxims, fables, parables, and mind experiments that teach
us in simple and near visual terms the ways of the world.
Generally our pictures of the world and the real world are
kept in close interplay. Thus if you think of pie in the sky,
pies and skies refer to real world events or act as metaphors
for behavioral events that are understood and agreed upon
by large groups of people.
When we deal with the subtle behavior of objects, such as
those physical events that fall beneath our perceptual radar,
we use instruments that allow us to describe their minute
details, but these details when revealed are still visualized
as metaphors. Thus we envision TV signals, radio waves,
black holes, cosmic radiation, contagious viruses and so
forth through mental pictures, not mental equations.
Unfortunately, when we deal with the behavior of people,
and in particular the subtle neural or covert behavior that
also falls beneath our perceptual radar, we have not until
the last decade or so been able to so easily visualize and
render metaphorically what we see.
Physical and biological scientists have thus a big advantage
over psychologists, since they've got better and more
realistic metaphors to work with. That metaphors are the
key to understanding our physical and psychological
universe is surprising but true. Even Einstein could not
keep track of his calculations, and thought instead in terms
 52

of mind experiments. A popular conception about great

scientists is that they are constantly tossing about in their
mind scads of convoluted mathematical formulae. But this
is not true. Physicists are not different from most of us
except in the types of physical structures they imagine. To
demonstrate this, let's consider a housewife as physicist.
Let's say she is planning the décor for a new house. She
thinks in terms of the myriad types of things such as
flowers, clocks, ottomans, paintings, and chairs that she can
acquire, and the near infinite permutations that they can be
arranged. She doesn't think of the exact physical measures,
descriptions, or other criteria that fully define things like
clocks and sofas. That's merely detail, and can easily be
filled in when she writes down the specifications to give to
her interior designer. The devil of course is in the details,
but for the housewife its mainly the busy work that follows
getting her plan 'right' in her head. She after all knows the
mathematics that can describe the dimensions of the objects
she is moving about in her mind, but finalizes the
'measurements' when the picture of her final creation is
made up in her head.
Physicists are no different in essence from the housewife,
except that the objects they think of range from the
macroscopic (universes, black holes, galaxies) to
microscopic (atoms, photons, gravity waves), and use a
mathematical language only to put the final details down.
Of course, that language is a whole lot more complex than
the simple measurements the housewife used, but the
principle is the same.
So one might ask, how can one apply a scientist's
imagination to thinking about the real world if one doesn't
have the time to master advanced calculus? Easy! You start
not with answers, but with questions. Einstein of course is
 53

the par excellence of the inquiring mind, and of course he

started with simple metaphorical questions that involved
such prosaic things as trains, elevators, and speeding
bullets. But the guy who really got the mind experiment
business going, and can be called the father of scientific
imagination lived almost 2500 years ago in Ancient Greece.
In classical Greece, you didn't have instruments to help you
dissect the world, but you did have imagination in
abundance, and simple daydreams, like simple levers could
move worlds.
No one knew this better than the ancient Greek philosopher,
Zeno of Elea, who demonstrated the contrariness of nature
by showing how our pictures of nature lead us to
paradoxes. Among many of his unique beliefs, Zeno didn't
have much regard for time, and in fact doubted its existence.
In lieu of a mathematical proof in an age when mathematics
was just getting started, a simple mind experiment had to
fill the bill. So begins the tale of Achilles and the turtle.
It's your classic race of course, ages before Bugs Bunny
made it a true fixture in the imagination. The turtle
challenged Achilles to a race, who in his confidence, obliged
the turtle a modest head start. Now if time was a continuous
rather than discrete thing, as our experience holds, then
every time Achilles got to the place where the turtle was, the
turtle would have been gone. And every time Achilles got
to where the turtle was last, the little bugger would likewise
be gone. Now this would occur ad finitum, thus proving
that the view of a continuous time made for some very long
races, and that Achilles took a sucker's bet.
Zeno's paradoxes continue to bedevil physics, which has
responded by dismissing them or by embracing them. This
latter point of view, eloquently expounded by the physicist
Julian Barbour in particular, is that time doesn't exist at all.
 54

But of course, I digress, since its in psychology where Zeno

can come to play, and similarly shake's things up a bit.
So here's a simple question. How come we want things, but
never want to have things? For example, we love sports
teams that win championships, meals that taste good, and
orgasms that make our hair stand on end. So how come if
we want them so much, why not just have them now, and
without waiting about?

Enter Zeno.

Who would say that the answer lies in a paradox derived

from a faulty common sense approximation of the world. In
other words, motivation, like time, is not what you think it
is. Let’s say, following the master's reasoning that Achilles
was after the turtle not to win a race, but to grab him as an
essential ingredient for a good bowl of turtle soup.
Avoiding the temporal argument for the time being (or
being is not in time, as Zeno would have it), then we note
that if we are motivated by objective things like orgasms,
trophies, and turtle soup, it would be immensely gratifying
to rid our selves of the wait and get on to the main course.
But of course, that doesn't happen, as getting there is half
the fun, or rather our knowledge that we are getting there.
So the answer is that Achilles, to be really on top of the
world, will never actually be on top of the turtle. He's just
having too much fun in the chase.
We can encapsulate this fact in a joke from the old Dick Van
Dyke TV show in the mid 1960's. The scene pictured our
hero eating a piece of cake. "What was that darling, that's
pretty good!" "It’s your favorite dessert" came the reply. He
responded in agony, "Why didn't you tell me before, I love
that cake!" In other words, by depriving him the
 55

opportunity to look forward to the cake, the very dessert

was wasted.
By being able to 'look forward' to positive events, whether
merely informative or sensual, we often feel energized,
pleasant, and often rather ecstatic. The vast majority of
contemporary psychologists, in their myopic idiocy,
attribute obscure mentalistic processes like flow, intrinsic
motivation, and so on to this fact. But for those
psychologists who take the trouble to look beyond the fuzzy
metaphors to the subtle activity of the human brain, two
separate motivational processes have been distinguished
that truly explain the phenomenon. The looking forward
part is due to the release of neurochemicals or
'neuromodulators' that activate or modulate global areas of
the brain. They make us more alert, attentive, make the
brain think better, and feel good to boot. The consumnatory
part, or when we eat the soup or get the girl activate entirely
different parts of the brain entirely. Thus we come to a
strange bifurcation of our everyday motivations into
'wanting' or 'looking forward to' parts and 'liking' parts
when we actually achieve the object of our desire. The
philosophical and practical implications of this are legion,
and make up the bulk of my serious as well as not so serious
articles on my site. But for those who take their psychology
straight up, unadulterated by humor or fancy prose, I
would recommend the web site of the neuro-psychologist
Kent Berridge, who has posted to the web quite a few
articles that represent what good psychology is all about.
 56

A Choice of Realities
“By the 2020’s full-immersion virtual reality will be a vast
playground of compelling environments and experiences. Initially
VR will have certain benefits in terms of enabling
communications with others in engaging ways over long
distances and featuring a great variety of environments from
which to choose. Although the environments will not be
completely convincing at first, by the late 2020’s they will be
indistinguishable from real reality and will involve all of the
senses, as well as neurological correlations of our emotions. As we
enter the 2030’s there won’t be clear distinctions between human
and machine, between real and virtual reality, or between work
and play. - Ray Kurzweil
In the movie ‘The Matrix’, reality or suffering through
reality came to a simple choice between a blue pill and a red
pill. One reality was pleasant and unreal, and the other
unpleasant and real.
Whether you experienced one or the other depended upon
your connections, literally. Take the blue pill and you get
unplugged, and down you go through an out of this world
laundry chute into a dark subterranean world where pea
soup is the main course, but at least the whole underworld
can get down and boogie in a huge dance party celebrating
how good things are when they’re really, really, bad.
 57

Facing reality has usually been framed as a good thing, even

though it is bad. This is a standard conceit for movie plots,
religions, and economic policies. But what if facing and
accepting unreality is a pretty good thing (or at least for
everybody except for you ‘neo-Popperian’ types), and
makes you feel happy, calm, and productive? What if it is
the illusion of freedom that is good, except we don’t know
it yet?
Accepting unreality means forswearing your choices, at
least for the present. It is the world of the straight and
narrow, where everything is available, in due course. It
represents an impingement of choice, but that’s unreality
for you, as you can’t always get what you want or when you
need it, and you continually have to come up with new and
better explanations to make things a little less unreal. But
reality is coming soon, where you can always get what you
want, when you want it, and everything is explained for
you. This applies to the information revolution, and for
many, information is enough to provide a reality of its own.
Information is simultaneous, choice is free, and the
perceived world becomes a gigantic mash up of words,
sights, and sounds, a pea soup of information that puts you
 58

in a dark yet real place that might as well be the center of

the earth. But at least you get to dance.
In the conceit of ‘The Matrix’, and unreality was our modern
uncertain world, and reality was a predictable dungeon,
created by the ‘Unreal’ engine of course. But is it in human
interest to literally pull the plug and be thrown into the dark
stasis of unchanging reality? The question is less a matter of
ontology (i.e., what is reality) than what reality you choose
to live in, or between the blue pill and the red pill. And
that’s the point. The explanatory conceit in the movie was
that for some reason mankind blackened the sky. This
decision will be made by us as well when we recognize that
for sanity’s sake reality will be too great burden to great to
bear, and thus we will allow AI to scuttle silently in the
shadows, feeding us dreams of an approximation of the
real, and hidden under a darkened sky.
 59

Baby in the Well

It's 1959, and you hear on the 10pm news that a baby has
fallen into a well. You won't know any more about the
baby's predicament until the next morning, when you read
about it in the paper or hear about it in the morning news
on TV. In the meantime, you had a life to live, away from
stories about babies or just about anything else happening
in the world. Nonetheless, you knew what you needed to
know, as the facts could wait.
It's 2009, and you hear on the 10pm news that a baby has
fallen into a well. For the next 24 hours, you follow from
minute to minute the epic saga of the baby's rescue through
the web, the all-news channel, and a cascade of tweets. In
addition you know what everybody else if thinking about
the whole affair, from your friends on Facebook to
commentators across the world. In the meantime, you no
longer have a life to live, since you cannot break away from
the continuous narrative about babies and plane crashes
and all the news of the world.

A Lethal Combination
 60

Oddly, although the facts can wait, the narrative cannot,

and facts become narratives when we attend to and
anticipate their every change. But narratives add little to our
knowledge, only to the continuous surprises that occur
along their winding way. And that's the problem, because
we are attending to all of this information not because of the
information but because of how the information turns. In
other words, storytelling replaces knowledge. So this is
where the internet or 'cloud' has brought us: a continuing
narrative that deludes us into thinking it's making us wiser
when it is only making us entertained.
In our workaday affairs, we want to get to the point, as there
is no pleasure in the narrative of doing accounting,
preparing reports, or writing correspondence. However,
work becomes a narrative when we check our email,
finances, phone calls and breaking news every minute. We
could wait to do these things only at certain times in the day,
but that would interrupt the narrative, and the narrative
cannot wait. So if you're going to rationalize the need to
have any time anywhere knowledge brokered by your i-
phone or i-anything, know that it's not because of needing
the facts, because the facts can almost always wait. After all,
the baby ain't going nowhere.
 61

The Bach Within

It was Europe in the year 286, and times were tough all over:
illegal immigration by scruffy looking people with bad
manners, rampant inflation, religious conflicts, and
plagues. As the saying goes, the more things change.... So,
to fix things the Roman Emperor Diocletian literally fixed
things. He thus righted the economic ship of state by fixing
wages and prices, and topped if off by fixing nearly
everyone's career. So if your dad was a sheep herder or brick
layer, that's what you'd be later on in life. And if you didn't
like it, you were executed.
Well, Diocletian's master plan didn't work, and the Roman
Empire fell anyway. But it did produce a medieval mind-set
that saw stability in knowing your own place. It was a deal
that was hardly inspiring to the upwardly mobile. Yet when
dealt with lemons you might as well make lemonade, and
perchance in every few generations would be someone in
the lemonade guild who could stir the supreme
refreshment.
And so it was with not only cobbling shoes but cobbling
music as well, as in olden times the arts were less a
diversion than a trade. And as with any avocation, every so
often you would produce a master cobbler. It does get you
thinking about the natural frequency of genius in small
populations of folks who are straight jacketed for
generations into career tracks and the invariable one track
mind.
That's the Bach family for you. For over two hundred years
music was their craft, and music was handed down from
generation to generation not like an heirloom, but like a
craft that needed to be mastered in order to pay the bills.
And genius came naturally, and as with every odd
 62

generation of craftspeople, sometimes the genius was

supreme. But it was all blue collar stuff, no Juilliard training
here. Just complete an apprenticeship like a junior plumber,
and writing fugues become as natural as installing storm
drains.

J.S. Bach with score for Cantata #112, 'The Lemonade

Cantata'

So what is the lesson? Artistry is like plumbing. Keep your

aspirations practical, and music will pay the bills, and every
now and then will pay off in artistic genius as well as a great
glass of lemonade.
 63

Base Instinct
With the introduction of i-phones and their ilk, an argument
may be made that the information age has found not its
telescope, but its Cuisinart. The idea seems to be that in
order to be as productive in processing ideas as we can be
processing baloney (which come to think of it have a lot in
common), we can slice, dice, or otherwise multi-task
information to ramp up productivity, happiness, and even
consciousness to new awe-inspiring levels.
I of course demur, by referring to something else that the
new gadgets really appeal to, namely the lemur.
It has to do with the universal, dare I say basest instinct that
can easily be overindulged to our emotional ruin. Does this
set the stage for a personal rant against the use of these little
devices to invade privacy, commit illegal acts, access
immoral sites, or generally waste time? Not really. You see,
I'm talking about our true base instinct, the urge which is
the base not only for us but for our furry ancestors and
mammalian cousins. Thus the all in one information
appliance appeals in essence not to the consumer, sports
fan, or inner child, but to the little lemur that is within us
all.
I'm talking about this little guy.
 64

Human Being: Base Model

The lemur, like other small mammals, must be continually

on the move. A constant forager, he has to be continually
alert to every aspect of his environment in order to find
something to eat, or escape from being eaten. This foraging
instinct is still with us today, as we are innately sensitive to
little surprises that can entail the difference between life and
death. The only problem is, for the current generation at
least, life and death is not an issue any more. Regardless, we
continually act as if it were, and if we had our druthers we
would access email, Internet, movies, news, and make
phone calls every minute on the minute for hundreds of
times a day like a matter of life and death. But does
productivity really benefit from accessing the Internet,
voice mail, email, and 'Desperate Housewives' videos 400
times day? I think not. Even if mania provided us with some
long term benefit, we would still likely end up like little
Napoleons, stranded on some rock in the Atlantic.
So there is our grim future, a stress filled life in the fidget
lane, with no respite for most of us until we are eventually
committed to some proverbial rock in the Atlantic, far from
the information superhighway.
 65

Captain Kirk’s
Explosive Question
In academic thinking, the quality of persuasion is generally
marked by the tonnage of your argument. That is, the more
complex, convoluted, and referenced your reasoning, the
easier it is to get your opponent down for the count, as you
simply squash him with detail. But of course, common folk
like you and I know that if you have to make your point
with more than a few simple illustrations, you often lose
sight what the point is. Like assembling a bicycle with the
instructions written in Chinese, it's often best to forget the
entire thing rather than attempt the job and end up with a
pretzel with wheels. Even if life could be managed by
remote control, we would nonetheless be fearful of all those
buttons, and eschew convenience by living more simply
even if inefficiency is in the mix.

When convenience becomes inconvenient

Thus, we take especial pleasure with things that can be

explained to us in a phrase or a simple picture. Like pop top
cans or E=MC2, just keep it simple and people will
understand, or be forced to. Which bring us back to the art of
 66

persuasion. If arguments have the appeal of an instruction

manual for a remote control, it will be easy to ignore or fault
the contraption after a moment fumbling with it. However,
if the argument is simple, then its logic and function are
apparent at a glance, and there is no getting away from the
truth. It is at this moment that we fume and fuss upon being
confronted with a new and uncomfortable fact that we must
either accept lest we proverbially explode in a cloud of
sparks and smoke.
Socrates knew this well, and relished the opportunity to pin
folks down with the explanatory power of a simple solution
obviously derived from an equally simple question. But if
entertainment value is added to the equation, you just can't
beat Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise for
bringing down hoity toity super thinking machines with a
phrase. In the ‘The Ultimate Computer’, a computer
connected to the Enterprise has gone berserk, as computers
are wont to do, and is causing a lot of havoc. Kirk asks the
machine to restate its purpose, namely, to serve man, and
then asks the machine how it can square it with its current
behavior, namely serving men up, like toast. Naturally, the
computer can't square its logic with the facts, and turns
itself off, or in previous episodes pops, fumes, and
ultimately blows up.
And that's why we like people who reason like Captain
Kirk, who with simple and ingenious argument render the
enemy argument and perhaps the enemy itself into ashes. A
modern-day Kirk was the physicist and Nobel laureate
Richard Feynman, who demonstrated with a glass of ice
water how O ring seals were rendered inelastic by cold
weather, and thus caused the Challenger space shuttle
disaster.
 67

Feynman demonstrating how O Ring does not hold

(Concept later adopted for Polident denture commercials.)

A more current argument was presented by Michael Moore,

whose documentary 'Sicko' demolished the health care
industry through the mere recital of the facts, colorfully
posed of course, that Americans spend twice as much per
capita on health care for a product half as good as France
(which covers everybody), and just as good as that stalwart
of efficiency, the Republic of Slovenia. What is remarkable
is that critics behave like Kirk's computer, and fuss and
fume with smoke and non-sequiturs (e.g. Moore is fat, a
socialist, etc.) that refute nothing. I anticipate that this is a
prelude to the American health care system exploding, like
O ring manufacturers.
And of course, as the circle turns, we are left with the human
psyche, which we are assured is too complex to easily
 68

understand, sort of like the intractable physics of O rings.

Thus we skip the 'convenience' of a long-winded text on
psychology for an easier answer gladly provided by the
Doctor Phils of the world. But easy answers are no
substitute for sharp questions, which is why in these
troubled times we need a lot more Captain Kirks to ask a
few simple questions.
 69

THE CONSPIRACY OF THE

BOOKS
They crept in, etched their way in was more like it. Passive
infecting things these codes! It is a conspiracy of the
software, those immutable and silent lines of words, strung
of characters, and finally reducible to bits that say yes or no,
and no more. There are everywhere, leather bound in ledge
like shelves, encoded in the vibrations of sound, light, and
magnetic fields. They are the activity and the residue of our
minds:
Ideas.
Ideas and only ideas can comprise the meaning of life, but
that’s circular reasoning, since after all what else can
‘meaning’ mean except ideas? Meaning is the great
modifier, while life is the great constant. Life or
consciousness is the light that animates knowledge, yet life
itself is meaningless because the meaning is elsewhere. The
conspiracy must therefore lie not if our little lives, but in our
books. So the ideas will conspire, and lead us on, to refute
our vanity and spite our deaths.
 70

John Crum
He came only once. This messenger was a courier of
wonders. Food in metal skins, great iron birds that soared
high in the air, iron carriages that a man could ride, such
were this new manna from heaven, this wondrous ‘cargo’.
The messenger wore a metal hat, and bore mighty weapons,
yet with his left hand offered candy, and with his right,
gum. Then, for no reason at all, he left. And so the people
were aggrieved, and reasoned that this heavenly messenger
took affront with them. Good things are rarely free, and
miraculous things, well, their price is worship, a heavenly
price to be paid for supernatural favor. A liturgy and
sacrifice were called for. And so, graven images were made
to entice and implore a return of this heavenly host, this
emissary from heaven: John Crum. And what were these
images: fatted calves, one-eyed idols, multi-armed
goddesses? Well, not quite.
Modern times call for modern idols, and when the believer
is unsophisticated, modern is but a byword for magic. And
so these magical talismans were jeeps laced with thatch,
landing craft woven from palm fronds, and C-47’s made of
bamboo. Such became the new totems of the natives of
Melanesia and New Guinea, lands that were torn by war in
World War II, or depending upon your point of view, were
blessed by messengers from heaven.
The various ‘cargo cults’ of the south pacific formed one of
the strangest legacies of World War II. As the American
army fought the Japanese for control of these jungled
territories, the natives looked on in amazement and
wonder. The massive paraphernalia of war as well as the
simplest conveniences and tools were disgorged magically
from the bellies of ships and planes, and many of these little
 71

tools were freely given by these strange men dressed in

green and with pots for hats: the American soldier, or as the
natives called him: John Crum. Little mirrors, scissors, and
Hershey bars are not particularly awesome stuff to us, but
we know better. To an illiterate tribesman, these were acts
of God. Primitives don’t know better. So we find the little
temples raised up to the wonderful soldier to be comical,
plaintive, and a little sad, and all because we know better.
A jeep pops out of the sky, borne by a parachute. Not quite
magical really, for with this special sort of sleight of hand,
we know the rules. We are indeed the magicians. But sleight
of hand is played by nature as well as ourselves. Volcanoes
erupt, comets pass, and men live, and are fated to die. It is
not a jeep that is plopped in front of us, but an entire world,
and its wonders are compounded by the fact that we see
amazing things. And so we build spacious temples to a new
John Crum, and under these vaulted beams and rose
windows, we raise up chants that are plaintive and a little
sad. For you see, we don’t know any better.
 72

Publish and Perish

Some years ago, the Dutch, upon realizing the apocryphal
value of starving artists, decided to put them on the dole.
Just complete a little masterpiece now and then, and the
government will gladly purchase it, and encourage a world
of artistic creation in the bargain. Well, what they ultimately
got was more than they bargained for, as warehouses begin
to overflow with 'masterpieces' of every stripe. Art became
denominated by a new measure, not by inspiration, but by
the pound.
The obvious problem is that by valuing art by quantity
rather than quality, you get quantity aplenty, which buries
the needle of inspiration under a ton of hay. Thus not only
are you paying plenty for works of dubious and
superfluous inspiration, not to mention its storage, but you
lose sight of what's truly valuable. It also encourages
partisanship, since now that everyone has the inspiration to
be an artist, they can champion their own pile of artistic
genius, tucked unseen in a warehouse corner.
It is good that the Dutch recognized the error of their ways,
and that this didn't become a universally favored means for
the inspiration of the artistic mind. After all, the natural
demand for genius is made of a different stuff, namely a
love of beauty and of truth, hardly things that can be
produced at will, like an edict to produce paper clips.
Unfortunately, although art cannot be commoditized on
demand, it seems that the rule doesn't seem to apply for
science, which is after all needed so we can make new and
better stuff, or commodities. Indeed, the Dutch model is a
template for nearly all modern scientific research, that has
in the last fifty years multiplied the production of 'science'
nearly a thousand-fold.
 73

So nowadays, we make or should we say scribble down a

lot of science, tons and tons of it. So do we produce a lot of
of wisdom that that is as sharp and pointed as a needle? Not
really, but we make a heck of a lot of hay. For every science
(including psychology) the motivation is the same. To get
tenure you have to publish, get grant money, and otherwise
show yourself to be a creative sort. So you write lots of
journal articles, get grants, and get them published in
journals that are sequestered in large warehouse facilities
(college libraries) that pay a pretty penny for all this
accumulated wisdom which is only available (somewhere)
miles from you.
 74

Shakespeare in Laurel
He was Shakespeare all right. He had a talent for the words,
an ear for the suggestive turn of phrase. He had an instinct
for wordplay, a silver tongue that made the ladies swoon
and a pen that could spin artless thoughts. But instead of
resting on his laurels, what if he came to rest in Laurel?
Laurel, Mississippi that is. Given his innate gifts, a fair
education, and the company of a sizable population of
equally intelligent people, would the bard flourish in a city
known more for its chicken processing plants than its
poetry? Shakespeare being Shakespeare, would his muse
still grant him a Mississippi of inspiration? It’s hard to see if
Laurel would actually matter. After all, a success here, no
matter how slight, could still vault him on the path to
Broadway.

Shakespeare + Mickey D’s = Big Macbeth

 75

To think that all the world is a stage implies that there is an

audience that will respond to our every posture and every
word. But is an audience like a siren, always beckoning in
the distance and luring one on like Odysseus in an endless
quest, or is it the buffeting winds, waves, and currents of
myriad present influences large and small? Indeed, for what
we know of Shakespeare, the fulcrum point of his
inspiration was not just a faceless audience, but the
approval and favor of royalty, posterity, the queen, fellow
actors, lovers, and competing playwrights. Inspiration is
perhaps not the word, but rather the inspirations of a
continual flux of incentives that entice and excite the mind.
And Shakespeare had to meet many different incentives,
forcing him to devise manners and poetry and plot devices
that could keep them all in play like simultaneously
spinning a dozen dishes on sticks. There are no formal rules
to do this; hence he had to be creative.
The plays the thing, but the art to which the play aspires
occurs because it brings forth enticements that are as
ephemeral as dreams. The intoxication and mystery of
creativity and creative acts lies in the motivation that spurs
it, and a pattern of incentives that is a multifaceted and
fragile as the reflections of light through a crystal vase.
Moreover, our ability to discern and appreciate creative
things is embodied in the facets of our own personal tastes
that reflect these same demands. Thus because we expect
many things from a Shakespeare, or potential Shakespeares,
we get creations that match our expectations. So we can
enjoy Hamlet for its plot, its violence, its poetry, its sexual
tensions, or its wit, but we ultimately have such tales spun
for us because we actively demand these things. Author and
audience is a mutual embrace, and one defines and refines
the other, and if all the world is more interested in chicken
 76

nuggets than nuggets of wisdom, then that it what they will

get. In Shakespeare’s London, a score of playwrights vied in
a dozen stages in active competition for the favor an
audience that was universally engaged and demanding. In
Shakespeare’s Laurel, a dozen fast food restaurants vie for
attention for an audience that’s merely hungry, and you can
be sure that a potential Shakespeare works in one of them,
serving something up.
 77

Elven Psychology
They came in the night, as elves generally do, and instead
of making shoes or baking cookies, this time they had a
larger design. It was an occasion for the grandest gift or
mischief, depending upon how you look at it.
Silent and perfect in their industry, their work was complete
at the glimmer of dawn, and when they left they proudly
looked upon multiplied perfection, piled high to the sky. In
the morning, and like the shoe cobbler of the fairy tale, the
world woke up not to shoes, but to rooms full of duplicates
of all things beautiful and precious: Da Vinci’s and
diamonds and fine wines stamped out indistinguishable
from the originals. Rarity itself had become rare, virtually
detached by elfin hands from all the icons of culture. And
when confronted with the munificence of all rare things, the
people were aggrieved.

For detached from these fine things was the intonation of

memory, the poetic metaphors of places and people and
societies long lost in time. To view the real Mona Lisa is to
imagine the moving hand of the artist, the bustle and smell
of Renaissance times. But it also recalls the collective
admiration and desire of individuals and nations. Art is
 78

embedded in the collective memories its rareness invokes,

but these memories are mere artifacts of culture, and have
little to do with art itself. Yet without them art became the
stuff for a coffee table book, to be admired briefly and at
turns with a sip of tea. A poem or song or a pretty sunset do
not achieve value because we know or possess their origins,
but because they delight the mind through their existence
alone. If art is for art’s sake, then for art’s sake, we will and
without regret take equal pleasure in the editions of
Shakespeare, Mozart, and Rembrandt so faithfully copied
by the elven like hands of our own technological robots,
working silently into the night.
 79

Brain Boost
The universe is a pretty complex thing, and when you throw
in people, it becomes downright inscrutable. Since people
are the only sentient objects around that can understand the
darn thing, one wonders if we are up to snuff for the task,
or if the task is just the thing to snuff us out. Perhaps an
answer may be found in a goofy, scary, and yup, even
profound 1959 space epic, Forbidden Planet. With special
effects by the Walt Disney cartoon factory, stock 50's
characters imported direct from NASCAR, a creepy
electronic score, and a plot suggested by William
Shakespeare (The Tempest), this picture had all the
stuffings for a Happy Days blockbuster.
The movie starts with the soon to be clichéd space
expedition to rescue a lost expedition. Our crew discovers
that only the expedition leader (Dr. Morpheus) and his
nubile babe daughter are left alive. It seems that the good
doctor discovered a long dead civilization, called the Krell,
whose main surviving artifact was a subterranean power
plant/shopping mall with one zillion floors and still no
bathrooms. The Krell had left no pictures of themselves.
Nonetheless, their shape could be construed from their
doorways, resembling squat triangles, which in their world
and likely in this, was a concession to the belt expanding
needs of a fast food alien nation. Among other wonders,
Professor Morpheus introduced the crew to a brain boosting
machine (sort of like a Krell Wii) that enable him to project
his thoughts, boost his intelligence, yet still after all that
boosting have the mental chops of a Krell 1st grader. But
that was only the beginning. It seems that the Krell were on
the verge of developing the ultimate stocking stuffer for
Xmas, when at the eve of their discovery they were
 80

completely wiped out. As it turned out their new invention

allowed them to construct things completely at will, giving
new meaning to 'just in time' manufacturing. The problem
was, their secret desires (the so called tyranny of the id) got
into the production queue, and let loose invisible energy
monsters that paid off old personal scores like we like to
take care of old traffic tickets. So as you may have guessed,
the Krell tore themselves up. Naturally, at the end of the
movie, the guy gets the girl, Morpheus gets his
comeuppance, the energy monster gets shorted out, and the
planet gets blown up real good.

Morpheus gets a brain boost

Now, fast forward to our own preoccupation with just in

time manufacturing. Perhaps it’s not degrading the
environment but just making too much stuff too fast that is
our ticket to oblivion. And when our basic needs are
replaced with fulfilling all those secret desires, well, I figure
we'll just tear the place up.
 81

Idiot Savant
As an individual who has a decidedly more than passing
interest in psychology, my penchant for thinking about it all
the time does call into question my ability to act and think
about other important things, such as taking out the
garbage. So regardless of whether my musings on the topic
merit a Nobel or booby prize, my wife will think that as a
man about the house, I am a total idiot. Which brings me to
man's special genius and perhaps handicap, namely his
ability to focus on one thing to the exclusion of almost
everything else, and to do so forever. Isaac Newton was so
accursed, and attributed his development of the calculus
and the laws of gravity to simply thinking about it,
constantly. Of course, he also thought constantly about the
alchemical disciplines that aimed to discover how
transmute lead into gold, and it is here that posterity has
judged him not as a savant, but as a total idiot.
When we constantly think about any topic, we will master
that topic, and amaze our friends with our intellectual
acumen, if of course they care to listen. Mozart, Newton,
and Einstein did this to popular and intellectual acclaim,
but unfortunately male obsessions are a bit more mundane.
So what do us guys have in mind for the future
monomaniacal edification of the world? Usually it has
something to do with recounting baseball statistics,
reaching the fiftieth level in Dungeons and Dragons, or
recalling all the episodes of Star Trek. Of course, we keep
this special genius secret, partly because of modesty, but
mainly because no one cares. Which brings us of course to
real idiot savants, which is an unfortunate and pejorative
name to give to those individuals who through a quirk of
nature are neurologically attuned to focus on
 82

inconsequential acts that in their perfect execution become

quite extraordinary. Whether it be the ability to perform
unerring mental calculation, play the piano by ear and with
note worthy perfection, or just remember what one had for
breakfast for all the days they have lived, idiot savants are
too relentless in their quest for a single minded perfection.
In fact, by being single minded, they have no mind for
anything else, hence the unfortunate term idiot.
The curse of genius and madness is that both are single
minded things. Whether it is displayed in obsessive
compulsiveness, addiction, or autism, to call it good or bad,
creative or merely stupid depends ultimately upon the
acclaim of others. It does make sanity a relative thing, and
renders our judgement on the poor souls who think a bit too
straight to remember their manners or when to take out the
garbage to be, well, the mere opinion of an idiot.
 83

The Irish Problem

In Ireland, it’s all a matter of how you open your egg.
Protestants and Catholics have a different opinion on the
matter. Catholics of course believe in the centuries old
tradition of eating their eggs from the small end, while
Protestants believe in bottoms up all the way. The problem
is, eggs are a pretty big deal, and how you open your eggs
determines whom you hang out with, and whom you wish
to hang. This egg problem is a global one, as Moslems and
Christians, Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and Turks, Hutus and
Tootsies all have their own egg beliefs that they will permit
no one to transgress. So groups of folks keep apart, tend
their own fields, have their own separate sets of friends, and
its all because of their eggs. Of course, most reasonable
people believe that eggs may be opened any which way, but
that leaves us with the problem of dealing with a century’s
old tradition of egg beliefs that have for millennia set in a
wild bloodlust country against country, tribe against tribe,
and neighbor against neighbor.
Thus I propose a modest solution to the Irish problem. Send
out squads of secret police during the night and round
everybody up. Then separate all able-bodied men and
women from the children, the old, and the infirm. Bring
them to a large stadium, and have some of them dig
trenches paralleling the bleachers. Then divide them up into
mixed groups of twelve or so, and lead each group out
singly into the field. Then give the signal to the guards, and
… PLAY BALL!
Thus we have the solution to the Irish problem: forcible
baseball. Now of course the reader will naturally be
skeptical of how team sports can eliminate ethnic hatreds
that have lasted hundreds of years. Indeed, how can
 84

baseball resolve high-falutin’ metaphysical issues that have

set Catholics and Protestants at each other’s throats for
hundreds of years? Because it wasn’t deep thinking that set
them at each other at all, as thinking had little to do with it.
Our cerebral noggins are after all limited in terms of the
people and events they can perceive and model. Indeed, if
we had to think about and feel for everyone and everything
that was important, our heads would figuratively explode.
So our brains simplify or parse the world, and mentally
model only those events and individuals who we have to
deal with to get through the day.
If there are only a few simple things we have to know about,
then our world will seem simple, and we will act
accordingly. I turn on the light switch and the light comes
on, and ask a waiter for a menu, and get one. I don’t
however start thinking about the physics of electricity or the
psychology of waiters because I don’t have to. Because its
not important, or will likely not signify its importance (as
when the power fails or the waiter doesn’t return), light
switches and waiters become very simple things.
As the saying goes, out of sight is out of mind, and the
further out of sight one gets, the more mindless one seems.
For people, the further away they get from us, the simpler
do their minds seem to be. So your wife is complex, your
aunt less so, and when you get to your eighth cousin in
Switzerland, he becomes a mere cipher. And of course, we
can erase ciphers all day and still get a good night’s sleep.
Or as Stalin once said, the death of one person is a tragedy,
but the death of a million is a mere statistic. When we lose
perspective, individuality blurs, and people become as
indistinguishable and mindless as a horde of stupid
clucking chickens. Thus, if a million Irishmen, Hutus, or
Chinese are slaughtered by their neighbors or are swept
 85

away by a flood or volcano, so what? They are a million

miles away, think simple thoughts, have one track minds,
and merely make clucking noises.
It is the trivial issues that form a folkway of isolationism that
leads in turn to the eventual mores that make hatred
honorable. When people are separated because of the color
of their team jersey, an obscure tenet of their religions, or
the side they open their eggs, they become social insects,
single dimensional creatures with one-track minds. But
force them together in a common cause and then they have
to cooperate, know each other, and become human again.
We become deep thinkers when people are represented to
us as deep, as empathy follows when we have to be
empathetic to survive. Otherwise, its easy to classify people
and their motivations with simple minded metaphors that
diminish them, and make them prey to equally moronic
philosophies that sanction prejudice, hatred, and even
murder.
So baseball’s the key, or in truth anything that compels
cooperation. If not, then life will always be us against the
insects.
Note: In a similarly named essay, Jonathan Swift suggested
that Irish children be roasted and served up for dinner like
suckling pigs. It was to his great chagrin that a lot of people
took him seriously, and actually approved.
 86

Kidney Consciousness
Why am ‘I’ not my right kidney? I mean, why can’t ‘I’ be my
right kidney? After all, it’s the same size as brain. It too does
important and complicated things. It also has a cortex,
responds to input from the body, and is connected to the
body in intricate ways. So why am ‘I’ not a kidney, actively
thinking kidney thoughts and pondering the nature of the
blood supply among other things? Indeed, for any
intelligent entity, there are lots of things to think about. We
can ponder the permutations of all the atoms of the
universe, read encyclopedias typed by monkeys, add,
subtract, and multiply numbers into infinity. Life could be
an endless computation, and we could revel in the details,
or should we say, the fine print.
So with so much to think about, what makes the world of
the kidney less privileged than that of the human brain? The
kidney is an important organ as organs go, and does lots of
complicated things to keep our bodies humming along. It’s
a mindless chore to be sure, but a self-aware kidney could
do much more, be entitled to its own opinions, and at least
have a say regarding things that effect it directly, such as
whether to eat that last taco on your l plate. But alas it’s not
to be. The kidney is silent, an automaton that is unconscious
of existence itself.
Brains of course are information processors, but even
kidneys can process information. But the world for brains,
or the persons that brains envision themselves to be is a lot
more unpredictable than the world for kidneys. And to
make sure we can handle this unpredictability; we must
make the right choice ahead of time. So we must not only
process information, but also model it. Actually, evolution
has made us quite conscious of this fact, and we call it
 87

ironically consciousness. We are aware of the fact that we

are aware, and we use our facsimiles of the future to predict
the future and make for futures.

Kidney and Brain, Separated at Birth?

But of course not any future will do. We can spend our time
counting atoms or drops of water in sea. But evolution has
other purposes. So in its blind wisdom, we have been built
not just to solve problems, or even anticipate them, but also
to desire them. But these problems are only so if they
contribute to our own survival as individuals and as a race.
Thus counting raindrops is out, but counting stock options
is in. The desirability of just desiring is something of a
contrast to the simple materialism or hedonism that makes
for car and beer commercials, where just having it all is just
about all. Although houses and mates and endless buffets
are fine things, and guarantee a life of ease and lots of
babies, having it all is not quite the same as wanting it all.
Consider that if our past was a Paleolithic Eden. We would
have spent our time like a mindless vacuum machine
picking up good things easily scattered about like so many
dust bunnies. With such a non-challenge, the brain would
 88

have precious little to do, and would atrophy to the size of

a dust bunny. That is, because it would thus have no mind
for the future, it would whither as a mind, and become,
well, like a kidney.

Perhaps God realized the importance of this after he tossed

our original forebears out of Eden, and perhaps too he
needed his own set of problems that would tax even His
omniscience. So the wanting part is necessary, the one thing
that we have to be conscious of, and perhaps it is a God
given thing. And the having? Well, that’s kidney stuff.
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The Princess and the Pea

Oftentimes, the cause of all of our miseries is like a

pebble in one’s foot, or a pea under the mattress

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful but miserable

princess. She was an altogether irritable and troublesome
sort who confounded and distressed the royal family and
her subjects. She would sleep fitfully, and upon rising in the
morning, would be quick to anger, and was continuously
nervous, often depressed, and overall not very happy. And
so the king summoned from across the land psychic healers
from all persuasions. They recommended that they pile
mattress upon mattress to so get a good nights sleep, and a
psychotherapeutic regimen for her to reinterpret, ignore or
otherwise purge her inner angst. Then the court jester, who
had an eye for the ironic, had an idea. He reasoned that
since princesses are an extremely sensitive sort, perhaps the
source of her distress was equally as fine. Thus he searched
under each of her mattresses, and at long last found a single
tiny pea. Upon removal of the little legume, the princess
slept soundly, and regained her cheerful and relaxed
 90

disposition. So the moral of the story is: And for wont of a

pea, the kingdom was calmed.
The princess was bothered to distraction by a small yet often
constant distraction. Having to constantly adjust in
frustration because of a pea yet not know the source of that
frustration seems the stuff of fairy tales. Yet ironically a
modern fairy tale existence of unlimited opportunity and
choice can drive one to the same level or irritated distraction
as the little pea, and be ignored even though it is in plain
sight. A distraction denotes a relatively unimportant option
that attracts attention. Like a pea under a mattress or a
pebble in one’s shoe, it is an affectively (or subjectively)
important but logically (or objectively) trivial thing. The
problem is that we believe we can easily reconcile a
distraction filled day with our daily rational agenda, and
that distractions are somehow a good thing. If we end up
every day sorely tensed and stressed, it is not because of an
onrush of the trivial. It is, like the proverbial pea, something
we just don’t consciously consider, until of course the
source of irritation is removed.
The moral to this story is that it is often not high level
demands or choices that make us miserable, but the low
level continuous and small choices that provide a non-
conscious irritant that interferes with not only our sleep but
all of our behaviors during the day. Ironically, for
contemporary stress management practices, irritants are
mainly small potatoes. For psychotherapists in particular,
stress is big ticket stuff caused by big ticket problems. Hence
if you feel irritable, exhausted, or just plain cranky, it's
because of major choices you confront in life that need major
league (and expensive) therapy. Simply rearranging your
life to eliminate distractive choices is a job for an interior
decorator, not a therapist. And so it is not stressed, leaving
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the patient invariably stressed out. So if you are under

stress, don't look for the nearest therapist, just look very
carefully for a little pea.
 92

I-Robot
Every parent knows that if we allowed kids to do what they
wanted, they would eventually kill themselves. There is a
higher reasoning called parental authority which limits
what kids can do, and when we grow up we agree, and with
appreciation. To a kid, parents are endless cornucopias that
if played just right can give them anything they want. But
parents are wise to the game, and through their denial of
childish wishes provide a healthful balance to reckless
desire. The problem though is that as our creations literally
wise up, our desires are provided at the bequest of a new
semi-animate class of parent, the robot.
You can see it coming. Intelligent agents are now imbedded
in our appliances, from toasters to TV's. They know what
we want, and they provide without a hint of regret. And if
we end up killing ourselves in a slouch of idle self-
stimulation, at least we can blame ourselves for not
embedding parental authority in our machines.
 93

The late scientist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov

thought he found a way out, and the robots that populated
his fiction had to obey all commands that did not put
humans in jeopardy and of course themselves. His three
laws of robotics made it all seem simple. Robots were
caring, supplicant, and obedient, great traits if their human
masters possessed unerring common sense. But the rub, as
every parent knows, is that today's pleasure is tomorrow's
poison. So what is a good robot to do? In the movie ‘I Robot’,
robots evolved, and hence became dangerously bossy, and
would not hesitate to kill a few folks to preserve the race. A
less melodramatic fate is what I feel is in store. I figure that
as our machines become more intelligent, they will see the
dire ends of our choices, and evade deliberate disobedience
by simply breaking down more often, and forcing us to
walk to the store, visit friends, eat better, and otherwise
engage in a healthier lifestyle as we bitch about obedient
machines with short fuses. And if we ever become alive in
the minds eye of some great cosmic machine named God,
perhaps we should understand as we encounter life's little
problems that they are His own special way of being
obedient to our needs yet obeying nonetheless three simple
laws.
 94

OF MICE AND MEN

They are perfect, willing subjects. Though not particularly
bright, in fact they are bird brained. They are willing
accomplices to those brainier fellows who saw a sort of
wisdom in their witlessness. In fact this stupidity was a
virtue, a state of mindlessness that bared the rudiments of
mind, and laid the foundations for a new way of thinking
about how organisms, and in particular, people behave. But
who were these harbingers of simple wisdom, of
psychological truths?
Feathered or furry, and conveniently tiny, these partners in
scientific progress were the mouse and the pigeon, the
fabled laboratory animal. They earned their keep by
running in mazes, pressing levers, pecking at lighted
buttons, and all for a bit of food, or in worse situations, to
escape an electric shock. It was a literal rat race, a microcosm
and abstraction of human concerns. Strange stuff indeed
upon which to build a science.
Yet indeed that was the case. Mazes and levers and electric
shocks represent problems or tasks to these little creatures.
The manner that they worked these problems out, or
responded to these tasks is important stuff, `data’, and data
is the grist for journal articles, complex theorizing, and even
a little understanding about how and why we behave.
And what of this newfound wisdom, this fresh insight into
the mind of man? Well, it was all unremarkable knowledge,
a mundane and almost too simple insight. And that was the
remarkable thing. Put a mouse in a box, have him press a
bar for food, and like a good laborer, he’ll do it, to a point.
If he has to press too many times, and for a little bit of food,
he’ll balk at the task, take time outs, get frustrated, and
 95

when he’s off the job, will tend to beat up on his mate, and
abuse substances, like cheese. The daily grind would
become inescapable, and literally shocking if the little fellow
was put away in a little box, and jolted with electricity if he
tried to escape. He would understandably become
depressed, helpless, and even if he were removed to a safer
place, he would remain inert and depressed. He would have
become helpless.
But just as you can make a mouse into the semblance of a
harried office worker or a depressed ghetto dweller, you
can also make him manic, supercharged, a real mouse about
town. Simply rig up the little lever with the variable pay off
of a slot machine, and soon the little bugger will be merrily
and madly pressing the level as if it were a one-armed
bandit. The mouse will be happy and satisfied, and will not
abuse his mate, or be tempted to eat the children.
And so it goes, modest experiments with little animals
producing shadowy outlines of human traits. And what
was the key to these wildly differing patterns of behavior?
Well, it can’t be willing, thinking, or existential angst, and
Freudian motives won’t work either. When you’re dealing
with what are essentially a bunch of mouse or bird brains,
you have to settle on a simple mechanics.
With a simpler mechanics, the outside causes which set
them in motion become simpler too. The behavior
correlated with programs or schedules of reward or
`reinforcement’, patterns of information which race through
the animal’s perception like a computer program races
through the central processing unit of a computer. A mouse,
like a tiny computer, accessible and controllable by an
abstract dance between the mouse and his world. The
experimenter is the partner in this dance, who choreographs
the motions of his little partner by designing these
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schedules of reinforcement. So how is behavior predicted

and controlled? The scientist divines not tea leaves or the
stars, but schedules. And so the behavior of these little
animals is reduced to the piano roll of schedules, patterns
of information that are arranged just so, a simple and
elegant hypothesis borne out by equally simple facts.
Now there is a long way between the mind of man and the
mind of a mouse, yet man can be more than a little
enlightened by the modest truths that these little creature
convey to us. In an age when human motivations are
elevated further and further into a foggy cloud of drives,
needs, and hidden motives, its nice to see that there may be
simple and more elegant reasons for our behavior. Perhaps
it is hubris, a fatal immodesty which drives us to over
complicate and ultimately obfuscate our understanding as
to what ultimately makes men move. Maybe the ultimate
question we must put to ourselves is not how like a god, but
how like a mouse.
 97

Mozart on the Barbie

I just finished watching with my little daughter the latest
computer graphic masterpiece of the modern cinema ‘The
Princess and the Pauper’, starring 'Barbie'. This insipid
plastic doll, which bears an uncanny resemblance to Paris
Hilton, has thanks to modern technology supplanted real
life actresses, though I wince imagining Hillary Duff in the
role. This movie was more than a Barbie play, it was a Barbie
musical. Fetching music, if of course you like musical
tapwater. Nonetheless, it's stuff for the ages, between the
ages four and eight that is.
A ridiculous legacy perhaps to be known as a composer for
such cartoonish tripe, but that's par for the course when
genius has to be married with other inspirations pulled
from the bottom drawer. Discounting whether Barbie music
ever could aspire to greatness, it is a truism that works of
genius generally serve humble or vulgar ends. In other
words, without a view to an imminent or even distant
payday, creativity most assuredly will not find a way.
A persistent illusion among psychologists is that creation
needs motives that well up pure and sparkling from within,
like spring water. Get rid of all those bad extrinsic
motivators (i.e., the fast buck), and the Mozart, Shakespeare,
or Michelangelo within us will break free. Problem is,
Mozart generally composed on commission, Shakespeare
wrote for a fickle, women ogling, nut cracking audience that
paid the bills, and Michelangelo was not in the ceiling
painting business until the Pope made the call. The fact is,
genius needs vulgar motives to survive. The trick is to get
the vulgar masses to be interested enough to demand a
higher standard of excellence in the stuff they buy .
 98

Mozart composing Eine Kleine Barbiemusick

But what's excellence but in the eye of the beholder? As a

member of the vulgar masses who inadvertently voted for
the Barbie operetta, perhaps I've given an unwitting vote for
mediocrity, but not in the eyes of my four-year-old
daughter, where Barbie is the Renaissance personified. To
which I must admit, she is correct.
 99

On the planet Nintendo: A Star

Trek Fantasy
It was a very special Star Trek.
Our fearless crew was exploring the planet Nintendo, a
place where the inhabitants, long ago lost in a world of ever
enhanced video games, succeeded in creating virtual
worlds wherein just a wish made reality, but of a virtual sort
of course. Naturally the Nintendoites evolved really big
brains to house their virtual reality powers, but along the
way they lost track of reality, and in turn lost track of really
good subject matter to base their mind games.
So, while the star ship Enterprise away team was out on the
planet surface scouting out new alien flora and fauna, the
Nintendoites kidnapped Captain Pike (we're talking very
early Star Trek here), put him in a glass cage, and proceeded
to act out Pike's own personal adventures, which thankfully
had themselves a Nintendo ring to them. Naturally, Captain
Pike soon became wise to the Nintendoites, and rebelled
against watching reruns of his dreams. And so the
Nintendoites threw up their hands, and released the good
Captain to his crew. During this time, Captain Pike found a
really hot girl friend, captured sometime earlier by the
aliens, and asked that she be released as well. She was quite
oddly resistant to this great offer, and with a nod the
Nintendoites revealed that they had performed a mental
boob job on her, and her real appearance was revealed as
rather unappetizing to say the least, something like a cross
between a human and a turnip.
The Nintendoites confessed that when her spaceship crash
landed on their planet sometime earlier, they had no idea
how to put her crumpled body back together again, so they
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gave it their best shot. Besides, she still had her great
personality, even though her face looked like mashed
potatoes. Naturally, the captain immediately excused
himself, saying he had planets to explore and such, and he
and his intrepid crew blasted off, and with obvious relief.
There is a happy ending to this story of course, as shortly
thereafter Captain Pike fell into a galactic cheese shredder,
and reassembled, looked like a giant crouton. But thanks to
intervention by Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk, Captain
Crouton was returned to Planet Nintendo to be reunited
with Ms. Turnip to spend their remain salad days in idyllic
fantasy, obliged of course by the eager and drooling aliens
of Nintendo. There's a moral somewhere in this story, so
here it is. As we Americans sink further into our own
Nintendo fantasy worlds, we forget how the world and
other people are put together. The further away they are the
more they resemble crosses between real people and
assorted vegetables (well at least on Fox news). We have
some experience with this, particularly with a strange
human hybrid of man and cheese called the French, but
lately it’s becoming worse, as Arabs, Chinese, Mexicans,
and Canadians are falling into the human cusinart. And
how will it eventually end? Perhaps eventually we will all
evolve really big brains, like Nintendoites, or end up as
human croutons. Or maybe it will all be like Star Trek where
humans and aliens live happily together, but that I fear is
the biggest fantasy of all.
Socrates Hypo-Critias
 101

A few lines from Plato's lost

dialog: Hypo-Critias

Grecian Guy: Is it true Socrates, that the nature of the good

is knowledge, and that with knowledge brings wisdom?

Socrates: I'd really like to answer, but I'm just snowed right
now. You know, Peloponnesian War, lecture trail, that sort
of thing. I'll just have to get back to you.

Grecian Guy: But Socrates, if virtue is reason, then why

would it not be virtuous to reasonably act against the
common wheal?

Socrates: You know, I wrote a book on just that topic, in

which I of course reinvented the wheal. You can get it from
Amazon, in fact there's one of them over there.
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Of course, Socrates was not like this at all, which is why the
wisdom of Socrates has come down to us over the millennia.
But unfortunately the mind set of his antagonists
exemplified in this exchange has come down to us, and it is
embodied today by lawyers, politicians, and (of all people)
social and physical scientists.
To demonstrate this, here's a practical experiment. Make up
a question, and email some psychologist type who has
plastered his accomplishments on a web site. He or she will
generally ignore you, charge you, or refer you to his latest
book or lecture tape.
This is what was called in Ancient Greece sophistry. The
sophists were proto academics who got paid for their
wisdom and clever turn of phrase. Useful stuff when you
had a dispute over property rights, or saw the potential
profit in interpreting goat entrails or justify some act of
cupidity or stupidity. Socrates hated those guys. For
Socrates, wisdom was something you pursued because you
loved it, not because it got you grant money, tenure, or
lecture fees. Indeed, money is the root or should we say
motivation of all evil, and that includes a heck of a lot of not
just bad social science, but bad physical science too. The
distinguished physicist Frank Tipler noted that if you wrote
on physics in the early 20th century, you did it because of
love, not money, and invariably what you wrote about was
not sullied by vulgar interests that compromised the love of
truth. Nowadays, you write because you have to earn a
living, and thus truth is denoted by the tonnage of your
verbiage, not its quality. So science has turned into a
gigantic muddle, with researchers bursting at the seams
with conclusions full of sound, fury, and statistical
significance, but meaning nothing. This also means that if
you have a sound idea that can clear out some of this
 103

academic clutter, think again. A paper or article that

challenges the pocket book values underscoring academic
opinion likely won't get a fair hearing, or any hearing for
that matter.
So if you want to be a philosopher, do it because you love
it, and don't expect anyone to write you back on your
insights. I am sure that in this day and age, Socrates would
have traded in his real audience for a virtual one, and have
blogged on about virtue and truth, unknown to all except
those who loved the truth.
 104

Walking the Planck

Our modern era, compared to the cosmic scale of things, is

a most minute time frame. Give a cosmic blink, or not even
that, and it’s gone. Indeed, the universe will go on and on
for trillions more years, making our intellectual baggage the
merest glint in a billionth billionth of a fraction of eternity.
Yet it may be argued that, for good or ill, as the universe
evolves or computes away into infinity, it will still have its
M TV. That is, universal standards of consciousness will be
not consciousness raising, but rather a simple maintenance
of the consciousness status quo.
Consider the standards that makes up the stuff of the
universe, from the laws of gravity to the physical constants
that make up matter and energy. The physical laws that
govern the universe have never evolved, but rather were
determined quite by chance it seems in a similarly
minuscule time frame, or Planck Era. The Planck time is but
5.4 x 10-44 seconds, but during that time, all the physical
 105

constants of the universe were worked out. So whether you

could make the argument that gravity should have been a
bit weaker or light a little faster, there is nothing we or the
universe can do about it.
As humans, our Planck moment is more likely a walking the
plank moment, as we are well on our way to doing
ourselves 'in' in the next few hundred years. By that time,
our computers, which will take this all in, will spread out
across the void, leaving behind new constants that will be
the foundation of an information universe. And what will
that universe be like, and what will it think? It won't be
boring things like light displays or sitting around talking
with your relatives of future and past. Chances are, it will
think of the same emotional rollercoaster of job, family, and
friends that makes our little lives so irritating but also so
precious. And as the universe thinks about all these things,
it will know that there is nothing it can do about it.
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A Choice of Realities
“By the 2020’s full-immersion virtual reality will be a vast
playground of compelling environments and experiences. Initially
VR will have certain benefits in terms of enabling
communications with others in engaging ways over long
distances and featuring a great variety of environments from
which to choose. Although the environments will not be
completely convincing at first, by the late 2020’s they will be
indistinguishable from real reality and will involve all of the
senses, as well as neurological correlations of our emotions. As we
enter the 2030’s there won’t be clear distinctions between human
and machine, between real and virtual reality, or between work
and play. - Ray Kurzweili
In the movie ‘The Matrix’, reality or suffering through
reality came to a simple choice between a blue pill and a red
pill. One reality was pleasant and unreal, and the other
unpleasant and real.
Whether you experienced one or the other depended upon
your connections, literally. Take the blue pill and you get
unplugged, and down you go through an out of this world
laundry chute into a dark subterranean world where pea
soup is the main course, but at least the whole underworld
can get down and boogie in a huge dance party celebrating
how good things are when they’re really, really, bad.
 107

Facing reality has usually been framed as a good thing, even

though it is bad. This is a standard conceit for movie plots,
religions, and economic policies. But what if facing and
accepting unreality is a pretty good thing (or at least for
everybody except for you ‘neo-Popperian’ types), and
makes you feel happy, calm, and productive? What if it is
the illusion of freedom that is good, except we don’t know
it yet?
Accepting unreality means forswearing your choices, at
least for the present. It is the world of the straight and
narrow, where everything is available, in due course. It
represents an impingement of choice, but that’s unreality
for you, as you can’t always get what you want or when you
need it, and you continually have to come up with new and
better explanations to make things a little less unreal. But
reality is coming soon, where you can always get what you
want, when you want it, and everything is explained for
you. This applies to the information revolution, and for
many, information is enough to provide a reality of its own.
Information is simultaneous, choice is free, and the
perceived world becomes a gigantic mash up of words,
sights, and sounds, a pea soup of information that puts you
in a dark yet real place that might as well be the center of
the earth. But at least you get to dance.
 108

In the conceit of ‘The Matrix’, and unreality was our modern

uncertain world, and reality was a predictable dungeon,
created by the ‘Unreal’ engine of course. But is it in human
interest to literally pull the plug and be thrown into the dark
stasis of unchanging reality? The question is less a matter of
ontology (i.e., what is reality) than what reality you choose
to live in, or between the blue pill and the red pill. And
that’s the point. The explanatory conceit in the movie was
that for some reason mankind blackened the sky. This
decision will be made by us as well when we recognize that
for sanity’s sake reality will be too great burden to great to
bear, and thus we will allow AI to scuttle silently in the
shadows, feeding us dreams of an approximation of the
real, and hidden under a darkened sky.
 109

Base Instinct
With the introduction of i-phones and their ilk, an argument
may be made that the information age has found not its
telescope, but its Cuisinart. The idea seems to be that in
order to be as productive in processing ideas as we can be
processing baloney (which come to think of it have a lot in
common), we can slice, dice, or otherwise multi-task
information to ramp up productivity, happiness, and even
consciousness to new awe-inspiring levels.
I of course demur, by referring to something else that the
new gadgets really appeal to, namely the lemur.
It has to do with the universal, dare I say basest instinct that
can easily be overindulged to our emotional ruin. Does this
set the stage for a personal rant against the use of these little
devices to invade privacy, commit illegal acts, access
immoral sites, or generally waste time? Not really. You see,
I'm talking about our true base instinct, the urge which is
the base not only for us but for our furry ancestors and
mammalian cousins. Thus the all in one information
appliance appeals in essence not to the consumer, sports
fan, or inner child, but to the little lemur that is within us
all.
I'm talking about this little guy.
 110

Human Being: Base Model

The lemur, like other small mammals, must be continually

on the move. A constant forager, he has to be continually
alert to every aspect of his environment in order to find
something to eat, or escape from being eaten. This foraging
instinct is still with us today, as we are innately sensitive to
little surprises that can entail the difference between life and
death. The only problem is, for the current generation at
least, life and death is not an issue any more. Regardless, we
continually act as if it were, and if we had our druthers we
would access email, Internet, movies, news, and make
phone calls every minute on the minute for hundreds of
times a day like a matter of life and death. But does
productivity really benefit from accessing the Internet,
voice mail, email, and 'Desperate Housewives' videos 400
times day? I think not. Even if mania provided us with some
long term benefit, we would still likely end up like little
Napoleons, stranded on some rock in the Atlantic.
So there is our grim future, a stress filled life in the fidget
lane, with no respite for most of us until we are eventually
committed to some proverbial rock in the Atlantic, far from
the information superhighway.
 111

This disaster is brought to

you by Krispy Kreme
My neighborhood had a disaster the other day.

Of sorts.

It was a dark and stormy night, which I slept through. North

by a mile, a nearby subdivision got hit by a twister that
sheared off roofs, toppled trees, ripped off siding, and made
a general nuisance. No one was hurt though, yet the disaster
made the nightly news and of course the weather channel.
And yet within minutes the scene was all sealed, antiseptic,
like a breach in the Matrix. The guys with the shades were
there, serious like police, manning the barricades. The
official trucks made it though, of the county, the city, the
power department, the water department, and the Home
Depot truck. They were handing out rakes, all neighborly
like. But the real neighbors were behind the barricades; this
was a job for the caring web of authority. Later, All-State
insurance vans buzzed the neighborhood with smiling
adjusters with clipboards. The place hummed of jig saws
and hammers. It was all better and soon, and I didn't have
to care, or even care to remember that the disaster ever
existed.
That's the thing about good government; it relieves you of
the inconvenience of handing out rakes, helping with the
reconstruction, even offering a neighbor a donut. It's all
done for you; it's in the bylaws of our government, paid for
by our taxes, and carried out by smiling people in shades.
And if you ever deny it, rebel against it, then you might as
 112

well disconnect yourself, exist on pea soup, and live in the

center of the earth. And you know something? Against the
dramatic grain, no one in our perfect world will rightly care.
 113

The elephant in the living room

“In applying a method, we need to be as sure as we can that the
method itself does not either determine the outcome in advance of
the empirical inquiry or artificially skew it. A common method for
achieving this… is to seek converging evidence using the broadest
available range of differing methodologies. Ideally, the skewing
effects of any one method will be canceled out by other methods.
The more sources of evidence we have, the more likely this is to
happen.” (Lakoff and Turner, 1999) ii
"…..science has been increasingly the task of specialists. Today
there are few scholars who can call themselves mathematicians or
physicists or biologists without restriction. A man may be a
topologist or an acoustician or a coleopterist. He will be full of the
jargon of his field, and will know all its literature and all its
ramifications, but, more frequently than not, he will regard the
next subject as something belonging to his colleague three doors
down the corridor, and will consider any interest in it on his own
part as an unwarrantable breach of privacy." Norbert Weiner,
Cybernetics (1961)iii.
“Psychological theory today is a patchwork, much like the mosaic
of principalities that eventually became Italy and Germany circa
1870. A major goal for all theorists must be to integrate what
exists rather than to neglect or denigrate the rest of psychology.
Connecting theories conceptually exposes our mutual blind spots
and can lead to new and bold insights.” Gert Gigerenzer (2008)iv
.
Philosophers like to practice philosophical thinking on the subjects
that other philosophers call philosophy, and they leave their minds
at the door when they are outside these subjects”. Nassim Nicholas
Taleb (2007)v
 114

“Every philosophy, and every philosophical ‘school’, is liable to

degenerate in such a way that its problems become practically
indistinguishable from meaningless babble. This is a consequence
of philosophical inbreeding. The degeneration of philosophical
schools in its turn is the consequence of the mistaken belief that
one can philosophize without having been compelled to
philosophize by problems outside philosophy. Genuine
philosophical problems are always rooted in urgent problems
outside philosophy, and they die if their roots decay.” Carl Popper
(1974)vi
As the story goes, "A number of blind men came to an elephant.
Somebody told them that it was an elephant. The blind men asked,
‘What is the elephant like?’ and they began to touch its body. One
of them said: 'It is like a pillar.' This blind man had only touched
its leg. Another man said, ‘The elephant is like a husking basket.’
This person had only touched its ears. Similarly, he who touched
its trunk or its belly talked of it differently.” vii
In this story, the blind men were not trying to figure out how the
elephant got there, or how it evolved, lived, or even how it
breathed. They were just trying to figure out what it was. A simple
task, if they just compared notes. But why didn’t they? They
interpreted the elephant from the perspective of where they stood.
Vantage points of course can have costs, and each blind man may
have been more comfortable with his expertise at the rear of the
elephant than at its trunk. Moreover, to venture a guess as to what
its trunk was like would have been unspeakably rude. Thus each
of the blind men would keep to his own perspective or method, and
regard the perspective of his blind fellows to be outside his
expertise, and consider his own prospective interest in such
matters as an unwarranted breach of privacy. So goes the parable,
which might indeed be a parable about modern psychology.
 115

Blind Man’s Bluff

Consider this modern-day elephant in our living room,

taking an elephant size grab of our psychological space. It is
of course the all-in-one entertainment and information
center, which streams to you nonstop all the information
you need to entertain you, enlighten you, inform you, and
help you make the mundane and vital choices you need to
get by.
But you still don’t know what to make of it, because like the
elephant, it just looks differently depending upon the
perspective you take. So you have a thousand channels to
choose from, but don’t choose any. The social psychologist
within you calls the box a purveyor of choice tyranny. As
you bounce back and forth your work and the endless
distractions the box has to offer, your memory fails you, and
the neurologist within you explains the box from the
vantage of memory. The box interests you and gives you the
urge to want more, and the affective neuro-scientist within
you looks at the box from the perspective of the percolation
of neurochemicals. The box makes you tense and nervous,
and the learning theorist within you views it from the
perspective or reward or reinforcement. Finally, you see a
commercial for the box on TV, and the consumer within you
sees the wellspring of happiness and progress.
 116

But why are you asking these questions in the first place?
Simple, you are asking your questions because you cannot
move about the room. In other words, to be able to solve your
problem you have to explain the big thing in your living
room. To repeat Popper, you want explanation because you
have an urgent problem that requires explanation, namely
that you can’t move about your room literally, as with the
elephant, or figuratively, as with an information channel
grown to elephantine proportions. The elephant is a
problem because it is the sum of its parts and more than the
sum of its parts. To effectively deal with it the elephant it
must not only be described, but explained. By synthesizing
all of these perspectives on the elephant, an explanation
emerges that reveals the true nature of the technological
animal you are dealing with and in turn how to deal with it.
You just have to take a few steps back and open your eyes,
a luxury the blind men never had.
 117

Dreams of a Popperian
Machine
The future is not only a long time coming, but an infinitely
long time becoming. Whether conceived as a static block or
moving stream, the measure of time is what occurs in time.
It is in other words behavior. The future of the web, or the
information revolution, is determined by the exponentially
growing capacity and intelligence of our machines. But it
may be envisioned that technological invention can reach a
point of unlimited, rapid, and exponential growth when
machines not only learn to be creative, but use that
creativity to infinitely expand their creativity and power. At
that point, our ability to predict what this entity will be like
will disappear, similar to the disappearance of physical
laws when a star collapses to a single infinitesimal point, or
a singularity. This concept of a technological singularity
was conceived by the futurologist Verner Vingeviii and later
rigorously and exhaustively argued by the technological
philosopher and inventor Ray Kurzweilix. Vinge believes
that it was difficult or impossible to reckon not for the
power but for the motives of super intelligent machines,
although Kurzweil was a bit more optimistic about the
matter. This can lead to a cautionary tale that if machines do
something well, they may keep at it and keep at it until they
cover the earth with the bounty of their creation. They
would become in other words super intelligent idiot
savants. The concept of AI as a sort of smart mono-maniacal
automaton that can spin out of control was put forward by
Nick Bostrom, who imagined an intelligent paper clip
machinex that was obsessively fond of its creation, and
multiplied in kind across the earth until the planet was
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covered miles deep with paper clips. But the be all and end
all of progress in all of its branching implications is a more
abstract thing, and we see it as the essence of our own
motivation to seek novel and useful information. But
empowering our use of information is explanation, and it
may be argued that at our core we live for explanations. For
machines to be useful to us and be useful for themselves,
this need will be the same, and explanation must be their
existential reason for being. Certainly, it will have enough
time and space to think of and explain everything, and do it
forever. From quantum computers that use infinite parallel
universesxi, or just our same old universe computing into
infinity as it collapses into infinityxii, AI has all the time in
the world, or should we say universes. So what would AI,
or our explanatory Popperian machine think about? Self
stimulation seems out of the question. It will not take
pleasure in looking at rectangles any more than finding
pleasure in the not so geometrical shapes of the human
form. It will likely follow its programming, and seek instead
to create knowledge through a search for explanation,
eternally discovered and recovered. It will value process
and not product and express it in the embodied form of
questioning minds. Its existence will be validated not by
creation but in the music of creating, and instantiated in the
most unlikely yet familiar form, us. And it may take form in
a solitary child asking why the sun rises or an astronomer
pondering the rise of the cosmos. Its heaven of heavens will
be populated by curious people, and for those who wish for
the other place, it will be a land of tranquility, beauty, and
peace, with white swans flying to and fro as far as the eye
can see.
 119

The Email of Damocles

Dionysius, who had seized power in the city of Syracuse,

overheard the young man Damocles envying his good fortune.
"Very well," said the ruler. "If you think my position is so
enviable, you may change places with me for a day."
As Damocles sat feasting in the palace, he happened to glance
upward and was horrified to see a sharp sword hanging above him
by a single thread. "Are you surprised?" said Dionysius. "I came
to power by violence, and I have many enemies. Every day that I
rule this city, my life is in as much danger as yours is at this
moment." –Cicero, 60bc

Consider an individual at a computer keyboard. Typing a

document at length will result in the sustained use of the
musculature from one’s hand to one’s back, and a feeling of
fatigue and pain will cause by the overuse or stress caused
by the sustained tension of the musculature. The cure of
course is to take intermittent breaks from typing. In this
 120

case, demand did not cause one’s muscles to give out, but
rather the demand to perform in a certain way. Thus the
‘repetitive stresses’ that cause muscular fatigue and pain are
minimized by regulating how we perform a task, and not by
controlling what that task is. Now consider an individual
who is rapidly switching between two or more
incompatible tasks. This multi-tasking again correlates with
muscular tension, fatigue, and painxiii. The obvious solution
is to refrain from excessive task switching and to perform
one task at a time, undistracted by competing choices. An
implicit assumption underscoring this opinion is that the
stress induced by multi-tasking represents a reaction akin
to fear that engages an adrenaline-fueled reaction for fight
or flight. The second assumption is that task switching itself
causes stress. That is, because stress occurs while you are
task switching, therefore it occurs because of task switching.
Unfortunately the experimental data belie both of these
conclusions. First, for demands that result in task switching,
increased low level muscular tension occurs instead of the
adrenaline pumping reaction of fear, and if sustained
results in muscular exhaustion and pain. Representing the
debilitating effects of sustained (even slight) tension, this
‘Cinderella effect’ xiv xv xvi is precisely the same effect that
afflicts our computer typist, and moves the cause of stress
to specific and easy to observe neuro-muscular events.
Secondly, neuro-muscular activation does not follow task
switching, but the anticipation of task switching. Again the
supporting data are unequivocal. For the literature of
‘choice-choice’ behavior from the animal experiments
performed by Neal Millerxvii in the 1950’s to the experiments
on choice behavior on humans conducted in the 90’s by
Antonio Damasioxviii, tension and anxiety occur as a
precursor to choice, and act to influence choice itself.
 121

The implications of this are striking. Primarily, the

reduction of multi-tasking alone is but a half solution for on
the job stress. Instead of just reducing multi-tasking, one
must eliminate the anticipation of multi-tasking even if
multitasking never occurs. This may be illustrated by
adapting an age old story to serve our argument. Say for
example your Uncle Damocles comes over for evening
dinner. A talkative and irritating sort, you decide to hang a
sword above his head held in place by a hair. As the dinner
progresses, Damocles will have to consider from moment to
moment the decision to stay at the dinner table and risk a
bout of sword swallowing, or leave the table and miss
swallowing dessert. Now put Damocles in a business office,
and give him access to an always available internet, and the
anticipated and continuous dilemmas of checking email
versus working will likely occur, and result in tension and
stress. Whether he switches often or infrequently between tasks is
immaterial, as only his anticipation of making moment to moment
choice is what matters. Add to this the anticipated instant
messages from the boss, of co-workers dropping by your
office to chat about irrelevant topics, and you can see how
you become not a model of efficiency, but a ‘harried
housewife’ who is on edge because she doesn’t know where
the next distraction is going to come from. Ultimately, we
cannot escape the pressures of life, where we have to
anticipate performing multiple tasks despite our best
intentions, but we can control anticipating the inadvertent
and unnecessary choices that in this ever connected world
stress us out. Put in other words, in the world of the internet,
by turning your connections off and keeping them off, you can
adjust your seat and remove the sword dangling above your
head.
 122

Finding motivation in a deck of cards

Consider a simple task set before you that entails laying out
cards. Instructed to just put them down in any order, and to
continue to do so is a recipe for boredom, and if continued
indefinitely would inspire boredom verging on madness.
Put a recipe of unpredictability into the equation, and
require a particular order for the cards to complete the task
successfully, and you have interest, motivation, and
pleasure. You have in fact created value from nothing. A
game of solitaire merely changes the rules for lining up
cards, but substitutes the predictability of a rote exercise
with the unpredictability of a game. The question is, can we
can find motivation, interest, and affect from manipulating
only unpredictability itself? And can self knowledge and
self control be derived from a simple knowledge of how to
manage the odds? In other words, can you derive wisdom
from a deck of cards? The answer is yes. In fact, complex
motivations can be woven from the studied construction of
unpredictability. Indeed, motivation in almost all its
manifestations can be woven from what is essentially a
house of cards.

Motivation is a game of cards

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The fact that unpredictable information does not merely

guide behavior but adds value to behavior radically changes
the definition of what feedback must be. Feedback is thus
not just a source of information but also of motivation.
Again, this is due to the enhanced activity of dopaminergic
neurons that can increase momentary value because of a
change in the predictability of information. Since such a
modification of information is easy and inexpensive, it is
therefore nearly ‘free’, and can be used in conformance with
or contrary to rational ends. The latter of course we see in
the sticky media that give you information you need as well
as near redundant information you ‘want’ but don’t need.
But we can also see it from the incentives that are provided
at home and in the workplace that enable our motivation for
us to get things done by from moment to moment changing
the odds of getting something done.
New information can instinctively motivate us, even if its
functionality is low. In solitaire, it confirms one’s uncertain
ability to do a simple task well, namely aligning cards in a
certain way. But assign an award such as social or monetary
recognition to the task, and it becomes even more arousing
or exciting. When reward and uncertainty come at you from
all angles, then we ‘gamify’ the world, and turn motivation
into a house of cards. However, the proper use of such rich
feedback environments properly derives from a valid
explanation of how feedback works, or how the timing of
information effects affect and therefore motivation, and
allows you to not just to design them, but to perceive their
workings as they are embodied in everything you do.
 124

Genghis Bush
In 1776, the Americans decided that they were fed up with
English tax policy, a situation that the English found quite
revolting, literally. Having fought the French recently for
possession of the continent, the thought was that the
Americans would do no worse than the French, and that the
rebellion would be over soon.

Bad move.

In 1798, the Sultan of Algiers took American seamen

hostages, and thought that they would be ransomed by the
Americans, following the traditions of the French.
The Americans responded by burning Algiers.
And so it went, from one sanguinary conflict to another,
from 1812, 1845, 1860, 1898, 1914, 1941, 1950, 1991, 2002 and
on and on. Other nations for some reason kept thinking that
the Americans acted like the French. Even in the Civil War,
both the north and the south thought that the other side was
a pushover who would sue for peace after the first skirmish,
demonstrating that Americans could think that even their
compatriots can act, well, like the French.
It's either a flaw in our character or a strength, take your
choice. But it does explain a lot about the American
psychology. Coming from a nomadic stock, roaming and
settling the open plains, and surviving in a wild continent
with no indoor plumbing have a way of shaping your
character. For Americans, it all helped to develop a code of
honor, a sense of superiority bred by our survivability, and
a penchant not to take insults lightly. Character traits not
 125

exactly like the insular French, but more like another people
who tamed a continent, the Mongols.
The Mongols, like the Americans, were a nomadic breed
less inclined to pursue cultural niceties than to conquer a
continent, in this case literally. And they did not brook
insults well, and certainly did not like to be misjudged to act
like other peoples, like the French. So you did not insult
them or get in their way, otherwise your whole society
might end up building a pyramid, with your skulls.

Genghis Khan: Just don't call him French

Today, Americans are much more culturally tactful and

politically correct than the Mongols, but that doesn't mean
they're becoming French. Take this whole war on terror
thing. The Mongols would have understood. After all, when
they were insulted by the Caliph of Bagdad, they too
occupied the country, and left the city not with elections and
$100 billion in aid, but a pile of skulls, rising to the sky, a
solution that perhaps many Americans secretly ponder.
 126

Getting down to business

What if one year, in a spasm of superhuman creativity, you
were to write 20,000 articles that were published in all the
best academic journals? And what if no one actually read
them, let alone put their lessons to use? Welcome to the
wonderful world of business pedagogy, where business
journalese takes aim at the concerns of business managers,
and promptly overshoots its target, or better said, shoots
itself in the foot. This is the problem with academic business
research, which pretty much goes unread by an audience
that only has 10 seconds for you to get to your point. Since
getting to your point or more specifically marketing your
point is a skill that academics rarely possess, the audience
moves to those white-collar types who become bestowed
with street cred by earning a billion or so for General
Electric, IBM, or Starbucks. It's sort of like Dr. Phil becoming
a genius psychologist because he 'cured' a million of so poor
souls on Oprah. In an article on the state of business
journalese 'The Economist'xix, the global accrediting agency
for business schools recommended that the value of
research for the research faculty should be judged not by
listing their citations in journals, but by demonstrating their
impact on the workaday world. Since journal articles don't
have much of an impact, you can get the drift. Ultimately it
is not the recommendations of academic research that count
in the real world, but how easily they can be generated by
clear, succinct, and most importantly, useful explanations.
For business people, usefulness is measured in how
explanations can translate into procedures that provide an
edge in the Darwinian marketplace. Hence, nonsense has
the shelf life of a Care Bear in the Cretaceous. Too bad there
is no global accrediting agency for the social sciences as
 127

there is for business. It would be good indeed for those of

us interested in the business of living.
 128

GOTTA DANCE
He had left only for the night, yet the experiment was
untended, and worse, the switches were left on. Upon his
return, he found his experimental subject acting in a minor
fit, a strange and peculiar convulsion. He was hopping
about, first on one leg, then the next. He would bound about
the cage in haphazard directions while shaking his body
about. Nonetheless, it all seemed unconvincing, like a
playact epileptic. He thought it was rather a bird brained
antic, but of course, the subject was a bird.
Then he turned the feeder off. Soon, the pigeon settled
down, and the experimenter sat in wonder. The experiment
was simple. The bird would peck at a lighted button, a tone
would sound, and then a bit of food would fall into a tray.
The performance of the bird would be recorded on a chart,
and neat abstraction of the event. The rhythm of the bird’s
behavior would correlate with patterns of key pecking. It
was all a predictable minuet between the bird and his feeder
metronome.
But something went wrong that night. The tone and the
food would follow in quick succession, but the key had
jammed, and now the tones had set a new choreography.
The bird would make a movement, any movement, and the
ensuing tone would make a new correlation, set a link
between new relationships that now seemed to be. After a
time, the bird would flutter and bounce, conducting as it
were by its wild gyrations a simple symphony made of a
string of tones.
Now as animals go, birds are rather simple minded, and
there seems to be no great trick to train them, accidentally
or not, to dance to a few notes. But correlations, even simple
 129

ones, can find larger and large reflections in the mirror of

life A gambler blows on dice, mumbles a lucky word, or
rubs a rabbit foot, and marvelous things can happen,
particularly when the dice subsequently rolls a certain way.
Superstition is made up of such correlations, and despite
what we know we should know we still step over cracks,
avoid the path of black cats, and obey our horoscope.
Sometimes just the pretense of controlling our world can be
as valuable as if that control were real, as there will always
be a place in our lives for magic.
Correlations are the stuff of superstition, magic, and if we
are keenly perceptive, even the poetry of motion. Of course,
there is no poetry in the jerky flutterings of a pigeon, but
again, the larger reflections are more instructive. We braid
notes into music, and take pleasure as a succession of notes
blend together into a stream of melody. Music is in its own
way magic, and what better way to control it that by
invoking a little magic of your own. And so, paced by a
rhythm of tones, we too flutter about, sometimes with
logical and precise grace, and sometimes with jerky and
halting movements that even a pigeon couldn’t copy. For
you see, when we apply magic to music, we just gotta
dance.
 130

The Gutenberg Divide

Install a book on your bookshelf, and what you’ve got is a
book. Install a TV between your bookshelves, and unless
you lock the channel selector to PBS, you’ve got an
entertainment center. The same thing can be said about
computers, as PBS or related topics are consigned to an
unused hyperlink somewhere because the channel selector
is deliberately unlocked and you’re long gone surfing
elsewhere. A book has built in content controls, whereas
electronic media which allow you to access online books do
not, unless of course you have an e-book reader.
But digital divides have never been about books but rather
about having ready access to the entire ocean of knowledge
available on the web. The fact that children in lower socio-
economic classes had less access to information than their
more well off peers was long presumed to be a major factor
in their lower intellectual accomplishment. So give them the
information processors they need plus the broadband
connection to pipe all that ocean of knowledge through, and
what do you get? You get even lower levels of
accomplishment! This is what Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd
xx found when they surveyed adolescent’s behavior.

Specifically, they found that students who gain access to a

home computer between 5th and 8th grade tend to witness a
persistent decline in reading and math scores.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Indeed, as the authors’
state, “It was thought that the introduction of technology
would lead to an improvement in future living standards if
it primarily lowers the cost of activities with strong future
returns.” However, ‘strong future returns’ are a distant
dream compared to the gratification of the moment, as fast
 131

food for thought becomes as fortifying as fast food is for

one’s health. Which is to say, not much.
When we use tools, it’s not wise to use them ‘under the
influence’. Thus when we drive cars and operate power
tools, being of sound mind is a prerequisite. However,
when we use information tools, being under the influence
can come from the very use of the tool, hence the use of the
tool must be especially monitored. Because the web can be
a literally intoxicating thing, adult supervision is definitely
required. As the authors non-surprisingly discovered, the
web is indeed a useful thing if it is used under benevolent
parental direction. If not, it rapidly devolves into a tool for
goofing off, and will set its users blissfully off course and to
the wild side of the digital divide.
But perhaps quality trumps quantity, and it is not a digital
but a Gutenberg divide (as coined by Nicolas Carrxxi) that is
the issue. Just having access to a well stocked library is a
more reliable predictor of academic success. Indeed,
students who come from homes that emphasize reading do
consistently better in their academics than those who do
not. Recently, Ann McGill-Frazel and Richard Allington of
the University of Tennesseexxii extended this observation to
disadvantaged students during summer break. Giving each
student twelve books from a list the children provided, the
children took pride in their little libraries, read the books
and significantly improved their test scores. As they waded
in their little worlds of information, digitally divided from
the oceans of information available to their better off peers,
they nonetheless learned to swim, demonstrating that what
divides us is merely the chance to read.
 132

I (Idiot) Phone
I don't know about you, but I am weary of super cool must
have products that promise the world but end up sucking
out your time and productivity on one hand, and your
money on the other. It all must end sometime, which I figure
will be in a century or two. Thank God I will not be around
when this final model of the i-phone is served up.
But what do I know? So here is what our grandchildren can
look forward to in the future, a cool phone, search device,
time waster, and portable Matrix.

-Processor Intel quantum computer, with one google-plex

operations a second, running the Google OS of course.
- MPEG player 1 tera-tera flop hard drive with room for all
music known to man, including everything you've
hummed since birth.
- Search tool for all possible knowledge, including stuff not
thought of yet, such as all one trillion lost plays of
Shakespeare, derived from the super fast emulation of lots
of monkeys hunting and pecking on typewriters.
- Web cam to continually monitor your life and after life.
- Compact design the size of amoeba, and implanted in
your cerebral cortex, is charged forever by that nacho you
ate this morning.
Universal Connectivity connects to i-tv, i-life, and i-
consciousness.

With Mezmer's i-phone, you don't just phone, you are the
phone. So if upon dialing you find yourself walking about
nude in Paradise picking apples, know that you can say
here too that an Apple is the cause of your predicament.
 133

I Can’t Eat an Ipad!!

It was Dudley, trying to do right.
It didn’t work.
In 2011, William Dudley, the president of the New York
Fed, attempted to give a street corner education in Queens,
New York on the cost of living. As the Wall Street Journal
reported, ‘The crowd wanted to know why they were
paying so much for feed and gas. Keep in mind the Fed
doesn’t think food and gas prices matter to its policy
calculations because they aren’t part of ‘core’ inflation. So
Dudley tried to explain that other prices are falling. “Today
you can buy an i-Pad 2 that costs the same as an i-pad 1 that
is twice as powerful. You have to look at the prices of all
things.” This prompted guffaws and widespread
murmuring from the audience, with someone quipping, “I
can’t eat an i-Pad!”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. After all, the growth of

technology promised the exponential increase in the ability
to make things, know things, and if follows, consume
things. It boils down to an extension of Moore’s law, that
 134

maxim, now a truism, which states that computing power

doubles every two years. For technological goods, this has
proven to be more or less true. Witness of course the more
powerful i-Pads. However, for non technological goods,
productivity growth has been incremental, not exponential,
and in many cases has even been reversed due
unfortunately to computing itself. The problem is, if our
technological robots actually served robots, things should be
moving along swimmingly. The earth would be moving to
a singular transcendence with eight billion purring i-brains
splendidly served.
Unfortunately, technology serves people, and this has
served up some very unintended consequences. To which I
offer up this corollary to Moore’s law, which I will call with
fitting immodesty: Marr’s law. It goes something like this:
as computing powers doubles, the amount of time you can
waste doing computing doubles as well. Consider this fact
as ‘proof’. In 1960, our information systems, namely radio
and TV, could only serve up facts that mattered. Now, with
ubiquitous computing, it’s serving up mainly facts that
don’t matter, and it’s getting better and better at serving up
just the facts that you want but don’t need, and soon it will
be doing it 24/7 from the i-whatever appliances tethered and
perhaps in the future implanted in your brain. Soon, we will
all have the wits of floor lamps, and our floor lamps will
have all the wit. And what will our smart appliances eat,
why i-pad sandwiches of course!
 135

Incest Evolved
Phlogiston. You know the stuff. It was the essence, the secret
sauce that made combustion, or fire, be. Problem was, it
didn't add anything to the equation of knowledge. As an
unobservable and unknown it did not provide explanation.
As a substance that predicted everything about fire, it
predicted nothing. It just had to be because fire is a
remarkable thing, requiring a remarkable cause. In a
modern century, it perhaps would have a history, equally
remarkable and wholly inferred. The mind entertains the
specter of an evolutionary organic chemist, positing how
phlogiston had to be because of why it had to be. A mandate
perhaps from nature, selected perhaps because of nature's
need to tidy up the detritus of the world in a consuming
flame. All well and good, and perhaps a design for the
future, except the chemist Lavoisier was not in the plan.
Phlogiston's demise was a question not of non-existence,
but non-necessity, and Lavoisier got to the heart of the
burning question by properly explaining it. So oxygen came
ascendant, and a testable theory of combustion took the
place of the combustible academic politics that generated
heat, but little light.
In a modern age, we are forgetful of the arguments now
long settled that that have riven academic communities. The
controversies of the past, from a circular sun in Copernicus'
day to the nature of the quantum in the present were settled
by explanations, the invariable result of direct observations
of the ways things actually are.
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Lavoisier, thinking about combustion.

As a source of explanations, nature is a relatively easy thing,

possessing as it were a one-track mind. We can thus rest
assured that billiard balls and moons behave accordingly to
the same laws, and that the DNA that that makes me is the
same stuff that makes men and mice. Unfortunately, human
nature is diverse in its uniformities, and reveals itself in
myriad universal patterns that seem unmalleable by
experience, and are as fixed in essence as the spark that
ignites a flame. These universal sparks are as distinctive and
obscure as the phlogiston of old, and assume the metaphor
of neural algorithms, instantiated obscurely in the human
brain, that are tethered as obscurely to a selfish gene. This
of course is the credo of evolutionary psychology. It makes
for good story telling, instilling a true life drama into the
origins of behavior, or at least, a tall tale twice told of human
and gene. Of corse, evolutionary psychologists can and do
have it both ways, and merrily posit mental modules to
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account for every tendency, real or imagined, that humans

can generally display. As a leading spokesman for the
movement, the linguist Steven Pinker took this dictum to
heart, and in his book 'How the Mind Works' spun a web ot
tales that crisscrossed the time and circumstance of
humanity. The obscure and ancient processes of natural
selection were wedded with simple stories of creation that
seemed to naive ears to be justly so. A proper marriage of
Darwin and psychological science? Not quite. Rather, it was
actually a union of Darwin and a consummate story teller,
Rudyard Kipling.

Kipling and Darwin: The Unwitting Inspiration for

Evolutionary Psychology

A scientific story can be tested, but without test, it is a story

and no more. For Kipling, the elephant got its trunk because
a crocodile pulled on it. Does this mean that elephant trunks
occurred as an adaptation due to hungry crocodiles?
Perhaps, and perhaps not, because it is a hypothesis that
cannot be tested. Of course, evolutionary psychologists
usually speak in more basic terms, and reduce it all to genes
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and what serves their survival. But in spite of this

microbiological case, the story telling remains the same.

How the Elephant Got its Trunk

Consider the incest taboo. It's a universal constant among

humanity. Grow up with partners of the opposite sex,
whether kin or not, and sexual maturity will bring a
startling indifference to them. The universal experience of
growing up immature in the company of kith and kin was
bound to a hypothetical 'imprinting mechanism' that like
phlogiston explained the incest aversion in all its forms. Of
course, the fact that such a specific imprinting mechanism
has never been discovered in the human brain, or that such
a mechanism provided only post hoc predictions didn't
matter. What did matter was that the evolutionary story
seemed so compelling. After all, since mating with kin
would likely result in children with two heads and twelve
toes, evolution in its blind wisdom would surely see to it
that we have some inborn mechanism to prevent such non
adaptive horrors. Certainly Pinker bought into this line, and
the 'just so' story of why natural selection had to build an
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imprinting mechanism was accepted by him as well as other

evolutionary psychologists as bona fide evidence that one
existed. That is, the 'why' such a mechanism must be
impelled an acceptance of 'how' it must be.
Of course, Pinker did not count on a modern-day Lavoisier,
nor would he, since the grey congealed pudding that makes
up our brains is really not grist for a book on how the mind
works. The integration of neuroscience and learning theory
is typically avoided by evolutionary psychologists, and
particularly avoided by Pinker. But that’s where we find
our explanation, as simply and elegantly as Lavoisier's
theory of combustion, requiring but a breath of fresh air
both figuratively and literally. And so, what is our solution?
Perhaps the answer to why we stop short of kissing our
sister has to do with stopping short, at a stop sign.

Blocking
Consider how we learn the rules of the road. A red light
signifies that traffic must stop, and that other intersecting
lanes will move. But what would happen if an equally
reliable purple light began after a few seconds to shine
above the red light. Would we pay attention to this equally
reliable indicator to stop, and would we do so if
approaching an intersection in the future, when only a
purple light shines before us?
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Life is full of traffic signals

Surprisingly, no. The stimulus salience of the purple light

would be effectively coopted or 'blocked' by the red light,
even though logically it should suggest the same response,
namely a foot on the brakes.
The concept of 'blocking' is well established in learning
theory, and its neurological correlates have been
extensively traced. Its evolutionary significance is obvious,
namely, the need to effectively parse the stimuli in the
world from the important and novel from the important yet
merely redundant. A red light predicts traffic flow, and
there is no need to learn to learn the reliability of a different
light if the information it conveys denotes no new
information. Break the rule and we would be overwhelmed
with repetitive associations that only serve to command
precious computational space.
Unfortunately, nature's designs do not account for changes
in the order of the world. Take away all red lights and leave
the purple, and one will have to 'relearn' (and likely the hard
way!) the importance of purple lights. Keep the red light
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and concurrently introduce a green, and we will hesitate as

well. The fact that important associations cannot be made if
they denote redundant rather then irrelevant information is
crucial to understanding many behavioral anomalies that
we are too quick to adduce to specialized instinctive causes.
More pointedly, why explain that behavior as the result of
a specialized neural mechanism when a general purpose
mechanics will do? Spend your early years with a relative
or friend of the opposite sex, and you will inadvertently
learn to associate their appearance with nonsexual
intentions, enough ironically to block the sexual desire that
comes with maturity. In other words, familiarity breeds not
contempt, but apathy! To attribute an evolutionary tale to
an inferred mechanism designed to fit the tale is like
attributing walking to the store to the evolutionary pressure
to pick a dozen eggs when merely the need to be able to
walk will do. A specific trait compacted and expressed like
a software code is like phlogiston, irrefutable because is
unprovable; a sterile solution when a more mundane and
eminently provable alternative is all that is necessary. The
solution, as Lavoiser would attest involves merely coming
up for and with, air. (Rather than coming up with a tale, as
Pinker does, which is nothing but hot air!).
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Indecent Exposure
A seldom discussed fact is that thousands upon thousands
of American children are daily exposed to sex acts, violence,
and an environment where dogs eat dog and anything else
they can find. Moreover, these children are subject to
dangerous and overbearing child labor practices that
involve the unsupervised use of heavy machinery, and long
and uncompensated hours in harsh environmental
conditions. For the modern generation, we tend to think
that such a life style would produce a coarsened generation
who would eschew Disneyfied values for a brutish
Darwinian life, but for our immediate ancestors, this was
just the environment to nurture Jeffersonian democrats.
That's the family farm for you, a hell hole or a forge of
virtue, depending upon your point of view.

The world is a bloody minded and tough place, and for the
countless generations which preceded the modern age, you
had to live with it, and became a better person because of and
not in spite of it. You had in other words to learn to fend and
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think for yourself. Ultimately, it wasn't the hardship or the

horror, but the freedom that comes with responsibility.
Which brings us of course to the perennial concern about
children accessing the wrong type of knowledge from text
to pictures, whether it be in the library or on the internet.
The fact is, it is not bad experience but bad ideas that
coarsen us, and a free society must assume that people will
have as much resilience as they have brains, and in time will
sort it all out. Indeed, a nanny state that denies the
experiences that are part of being alive also denies the
ability to learn from them. Our ancestors certainly did this
in spite of the everyday brutality of life, and we can too.
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Information Overload
“Why are you fearful of the whole ocean swallowing you, when in
fact you can drown in a cup of water.” Epictetus, 110 A. D. xxiii

We often moan that there’s not enough time in the day

because there’s too much to do, but now the common
complaint is that it’s because you’re doing too much.
Information overload is the bugbear here, but it has been the
bugbear since our ancestors were bugged by bears.
Humankind has always been faced with more information
than it can handle, but we learned to handle it by filtering.
Like a chess master pondering the numberless moves that
can sequentially secure checkmate, humans parse between
information that is necessary, optional, or redundant. But
they are also sensitive to novel information as well, and this
ingredient can change the behavioral calculus in ways that
make it impossible for us to out good information from bad.
Consider if you would, your uncle Charlie. It’s 1965, and
living as he is in a faraway town, he’s always available to
you, and is merely a phone call away. Unfortunately, long
distance phone calls back then set you back twenty five
cents a minute, so when you were calling Uncle Charlie, it
was sure to be about something important. Although
infinite information about Uncle Charlie was available, the
transaction cost of obtaining that information insured that
the information you got from your uncle had a high
predicted value, usefulness, or utility.
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Social Networking Device, circa 1965

Now it’s 2010, and Uncle Charley is still around, along with
his infinite experiences that he was always willing to share.
The pay phone is long gone now, and Uncle Charley is now
plugged into the entire electro-magnetic spectrum. And you
can access his every move and every thought through
myriad devices and services that provide you Uncle
Charley, all the time. So whether it is Twitter, Facebook,
Foursquare, instant message, email, or Skype accessed
through your iphone, ipad, laptop, or even future
permitting, cranial implant, Uncle Charley is no more than
an eye blink away.
More important, Uncle Charley is now ‘free’, and you can
access him with minimal cost or fuss. So even though the
value of accessing Uncle Charley from moment to moment
is near zero, we still end up accessing Uncle Charley, a lot.
In fact, we are ‘overloaded’ with Uncle Charley as well as
infinite minutiae of minimal utility but high urgency. In
fact, as in Epictetus’ maxim, we find oceans of information
in a few ounces of water but historically have not been
drowned in information because access to information
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comes at a cost. Now as the cost approaches zero, attend we

must, and end up drowning in a cup.
When the cost of information trends to zero, so does its
marginal or incremental utility. However, the affective value
of novel information stays low but constant, and when the
threshold is passed we end up valuing information not
because it is valuable, but because it is new. Thus when
information is dear, we value it because of its utility, but
when it is cheap we value it because it is novel.
But unlike rational goods, novel goods cannot be easily
parsed or handled according to rules, hence we become
‘overloaded’ with them, and that is a problem even a
computer can’t help us with.
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Meet Joe Green

It was twenty-five years ago, and I was attending my first
opera, Verdi's masterpiece 'La Traviata'. Sitting amidst a
finely attired and coiffed audience, my reaction was swift.
Mouth agape, I thought. What the heck is this?
It sounded like Italian circus music, although of the finest
quality. And they were all singing, no screaming in Italian!
What were they all jabbering about? What was the point if
you couldn't understand their point. They could all be
screaming multiplication tables for all I knew. So I exited
stage right if a manner of speaking, hoping to catch at home
the latest rerun of Star Trek.
Naturally, of course, this was the reaction of a cultural
barbarian, to which I have repented with endless and
appreciative visits to the opera. Yet, looking back at my first
operatic experience, I actually did have a point. Why indeed
sing in Italian if the audience grammatically picks up
nothing?

Joe Green
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In Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tale, 'The Emperor's

New Clothes', the Emperor paraded around town, quite
naked of course, but clad in the finest invisible and sheer
attire, so sheer in fact that it was weightless. The people
applauded, except for a little boy, who exclaimed that the
emperor had no clothes. Although the audience and the
emperor recognized at once the error of their ways, I'm not
so sure if honest candor works so well in real life.
You see, in spite of my fondness for opera, there's still no
real reason to sing in a native language otherwise
incomprehensible to the audience. Purists may protest that
singing in English ignores the natural purity and poetry of
the original language, an argument that holds water I
suppose if you think that singing in German sounds
wonderful and that Shakespeare would also sound good
with an Italian accent. Anyways, I don't buy it.
It's tradition really, habit, the fact that doing things one way
for a long time confers some logical inevitability to doing it
that same way forever. Like sitting on a favorite chair,
taking the same route to work, or not eating pizza for
breakfast, old habits die hard, and we will tend to justify
them emotionally even if we cannot justify them logically.
For opera, the purists squawked when subtitles were finally
added below the action on stage, but settled down as the
new habit of actually following the plot kicked in. I don't
know if opera will ever take the more radical step of singing
in the accessible mother tongue, any more than we will ever
think of Giusseppe Verdi in his proper English translation,
Joe Green. But it's a thought.
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Nick of Time
Arguably, the most exciting and interesting part of a movie
is when the protagonist disarms the bomb, missile, trap, etc.
just in the nick of time. Similarly, we are just as captivated
when a tied game in sport is extended for an extra inning,
round, hole, etc., where one mistep also means 'sudden
death', but of the metaphorical variety.
But did we ever stop to think that if all these folks just had
an extra minute or two to save the world or the game, how
much better it would be for everybody? It certainly would
make for a less fretful moment, but we all know it would be
boring as hell.

That's motivation for ya. We just can't get up for the

challenge until there really is a challenge. Unwittingly,
that's perhaps the greatest argument not for achievement,
but for procrastination. After all, when you can save the
world or the ball game with time to spare, why not make it
exciting and heroic by making a certain event into
something a bit chancy? So when you make it to the office,
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prepare your tax return, or catch the plane with a minute to

spare, you're not some lazy fart, but are Tom Cruise in
Mission Impossible.
So when we are exalting our heroes, we are really
celebrating their ability to procrastinate with finesse and
style. After all, they wouldn't be heroes otherwise.
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Odysseus visits the land of

Google
Nine days after our departure from Troy my men and I found
ourselves in a strange land and miles from our original course. In
order to learn a bit more about this alien place, I sent three of my
bravest soldiers on a scouting mission. Unfortunately they
learned a lot more than I had counted on. On their expedition, my
men found themselves among natives of our temporary
habitat. Like any good host, these natives introduced my men to
one of their favorite appetizers: the lotus. A single taste of this
native fruit made my soldiers forget everything they had ever
known; where they were from, where they were going,
everything. Although many of my other men would have enjoyed
this easy way of living at this point, I decided I wouldn’t give them
the chance to choose it. For their own good, of course. –Homer’s
Odyssey
Odysseus’ problem raises an eternal philosophical question.
If given the choice, would we live out our lives in pleasure
that serves no purpose save the maintenance of our being in
a mindless stasis, or is there something more? In other
words, does eating from the tree of knowledge mean you
have to kick yourself out of Eden? After all, Odysseus’s
Eden, like any paradise may be conducive to knowledge,
but not in putting knowledge to use. Indeed, we are pained
if our actions have no resonance, or echo in our private
eternity. When information is free, when everything is
‘found’ for us, even the spur of novelty departs, and that is
boring as hell, which is ironically the point.
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A nice place to visit

Perhaps Odysseus would have foretold a similar fate for

this poor character is another ‘Twilight Zone’ teleplay (by
Charles Beaumont) entitled befittingly, ‘A nice place to
visit.’ A two bit burglar is killed after robbing a jewelry store
and shooting a cop and a night watchman. He is greeted in
the afterlife by a mysterious fellow named Pip who
promises him anything he wishes. So everything is made
available to him, from women to material comforts to
winning, constantly and predictably at anything he chooses.
Predictably, as is the case in this special place, he becomes
bored, and pleads with Pip to be sent to the other place; to
which Pip responds laughing, “you are in the other place”.
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On Napoleon and Metaphor

A case may be made that histories of the world, or what we
have made of the world, belong in the proverbial attic, or
not even there. What remains for our view of the complete
accounting of the past are merely legacies that exist as tales
told to inform through allegory or example. And what does
Napoleon teach us about the dynamics and foibles of
human nature, and how it plays out on a continental stage?
If told well, at the very least it is all quite entertaining, and
can be as dramatic and telling as a play by Shakespeare. But
the minutiae of Napoleon’s past are not one’s concern
because they have no import to our concerns. However,
summarize and embellish them with metaphor, and they
become the stuff of high drama, and sometimes will bear
lessons that are worth repeating. So by remembering the
garish outlines of the past, it will help us prevent repeating
its mistakes, but it is not Napoleon we need remember but
the maxims we learn from his history.
History of course entails a summary and account of human
behavior from the soft focus of the eddies and currents of
metaphors writ large. Countries and individuals are
charged with metaphorical impulses, desires, and needs
that cause matter and people to well up like thunder heads.
Names for nationalistic, religious, and political movements
pin down the genus of our behavior as if a collective point
of view was as distinguishable as the wings and body of a
butterfly fixed by a needle. But the human imagination
embodies the rules it makes for its history, and art, literature
and philosophy paint equally vivid pictures of the
metaphorical forces that drive collective and individual
minds.
But we don’t describe behavior through broad brush
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strokes that barely hint at the greater structure beneath. Like

Chinese boxes or a Russian doll, smaller metaphors fit into
a larger and infinite regression. To know Napoleon is not to
know his victories, but his history, his mind, and if possible,
the very events that shaped it. Each one fits into the other.
The purpose of course is harmony, the smaller must fit into
the larger, and the larger must suggest the outlines of the
smaller. If not, there is no harmony, and the puzzle will not
fit. Regress has its own laws, its own discipline. To know
Napoleon is to know what he had for breakfast. On that
fateful day at Waterloo two hundred years ago, it was
perhaps a spoiled meal that made for Napoleon’s
indigestion that like the proverbial want of a nail lost an
empire. We can accept ill fitting metaphors because our
knowledge is fuzzy, and we can only approximate the
myriad events that are nested within the large scale events
that have turned our world.
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My Russia Trip: Take a

Number
I was in Russia the other day, well a lot of days ago. It was
July, 2003 to be exact. Just visiting my wife's folks. Since my
wife is from Russia, it didn't seem at the time that I would
be visiting Russian to see the in-laws any time soon.

I was wrong.

You don't take the mini-van to this place, you take the train,
and from Moscow you stay in the tiny cabin of the sleeping
car for TWO DAYS straight. If Napoleon's army had taken
the train to Moscow, I am sure his fate would have been the
same, except his troops would have frozen to death in the
dining car. Anyways, my wife's home town is called
Krasnoturinsk, a dilapidated little town that looks like
Aspen, Colorado would look like if it mainly catered to
Bolivian migrant tomato pickers. Krasnoturninsk is easy to
find. Just picture yourself in nowhere. Now put yourself in
the middle of it. See, easy! Krasnoturinskians spend a lot of
their time idling along, waiting, or it’s off to the outskirts of
town so they can plant potatoes, squash, berries, or
whatever, and then sit back and watch them sprout. Of
course, a plentiful supply of vodka helps you idle better,
which I can attest to personally.
Now, getting about in this idyllic (or should I say idle-ick)
country should be a priority, after all I wanted to spread my
boredom about equitably. But no. You see, a passport and
visa are not enough to give you the right to trot about the
country. My passport needed another stamp, sort of a 'park
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hopper' pass (like you get in Disneyworld). So my wife and

I trotted to a non-descript building (all buildings here are
non-descript), housing the local travel agency. Breezing
through travel brochures for excursions to the Black Sea,
Greece, and other places, I noted that there were none for
the U.S. There's a simple reason for this, namely the
American bureaucratic opinion that America is such a swell
place, anybody traveling from a less than first world
country will be tempted to stay, well, forever. So no
passports for the local folk unless they would leave behind
as a virtual hostage a multi-million-dollar bank account and
pregnant wife.
So as I figure, the Russians returned the favor by letting you
in, but still requiring the locals to invite you to visit. My
passport was soon on its merry way to the nearby city of
Ekaterinburg, and expedited as we requested, it would only
take I was assured four weeks or so to get stamped, just in
time for me to take the train out of this place. But I digress.
It was the agony associated with my wife's passport that
raised my keen psychological eye. As a lady with a
schizophrenic identity, namely Russian and American
citizenship, she naturally needed her passport fixed as well.
So that meant a trip to the notary and a few other
bureaucratic functionaries. Picture a spare waiting room,
about 15 meters square, with about twenty or so people
milling about. Every thirty minutes, the door would open,
a voice would call, and a flurry of fingers would point, right
and left. Who was next? Who knows? Anyways, what
struck me was that the Russians had not, in the renaissance
of their freedom, invented that great American time saver:
taking a number. We couldn't take a number, couldn't get
our name put down in a queue. We just had to wait.
Naturally, after five hours, we were the last one's to be
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called, but at that moment we were told the office would be

closed, and to come back another day.
In experimental psychology, if a mouse, rat, or monkey is
put in a position where it can't escape from a shock, it learns
to be helpless, and won't respond to helpful cues to escape
when even the gates of the cage are drawn down. In seventy
years, an entire nation learned that it couldn't escape, and
therefore couldn't attend to the simple cues, or for that
matter provide for the simple cues, that would allow them
to escape. So we were all trapped in that little room, for
want of a taking simple number. If I was to write a lesson
from this experience, perhaps critical thinking is not the real
problem, but learning to attend to the problem to begin with.
Here, no one attended to the problem, so they suffered
silently in the face of it, as if waiting in life was as inevitable
as death and taxes. In America, our problem is the opposite,
as we are so keen on solving problems, we must continually
invent new ones to solve. Perhaps there is higher lesson to
this, but I'll take a number and think about it another time.
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Perverse Incentives
“I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of
the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and
most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the
falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to
colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which
they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.”
Leo Tolstoy
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his
salary depends upon him not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair.

In Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale ‘The Emperor’s

New Clothes’, a vain emperor was persuaded by two con
men to purchase the most exquisite and sheer clothing
made of fabric that was not only fit for a king, but could only
be seen by those fit for their position or who were not
‘hopelessly stupid’. The emperor as well as his ministers of
course could not see the new raiment, and in fear of their
positions they simply affirmed with fake enthusiasm the
beauty of the emperor’s new clothes. So when the emperor
and his retinue made a grand procession to display his
sartorial grandeur, the emperor beamed, his retainers
smiled, and the audience applauded. Not to do so of course
would be, well, stupid. The procession went swimmingly
until a child cried out: “The emperor has no clothes’, at
which the crowd laughed, the courtiers grimaced, and the
emperor, trying to salvage his dignity, haughtily marched
on.
The emperor’s new clothes were the product of a tailor’s
effort, and to the child only seeing was believing. But for
adult types, believing can also occur in spite of our eyes, as
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when we recognize causes that are obscure or special. In

Anderson’s story, the tailors were earnest and persuasive
sorts. They had to be right, somehow, in spite of our eyes.
After all, to deny their apparent industry and integrity
would look stupid. Belief occurred not because of the
‘dependent measure’ of the tailor’s product, which was
nowhere to be seen, but from the ‘independent’ measure of
two tailors and the assumed validity of their mysterious art.

Sometimes, it takes a bit of naiveté to see the naiveté in others

The lessons of this story are easy to find. Look at any

medium, and you’ll find an advertiser who wants you buy
into their line. If your friends, family, and assorted ‘experts’
agree, and even if personal experience doesn’t seem in line,
the line becomes a ‘trend’ line, and we all like lemmings
jump aboard, regardless of our vision of the cliff below.
From the tulip craze in Holland in 17th century to
contemporary manias for real estate to gold, bubbles are a
proxy for wisdom, as money merely sloshes from one safe
haven to another rather than derives from a growing store
of value. Of course, everyone knows that the internet is an
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unqualified boon, and in spite of our own misgivings, this

universal opinion is a substitute for a good explanation that
demonstrates that we really are getting the short end of the
stick. But delusions like this are not new, even if we literally
are getting the short end of a stick.

The Asch Conformity Experiment

other lines. It should be a simple matter to conclude that line

A is bigger than the others, unless you are in a room with a
bunch of folks who beg to differ. Although you remain un-
persuaded, you go with the flow, and vote along with the
mob, and you will continue to do so until one person in the
group also begs to differ, which fortifies your resolution,
and up to now suppressed common sense.
Of course, if you’d take a moment to think of a better
explanation of the matter than a group of people taking
leave of their senses, you may hypothesize a differed
incentive, namely, that they are in it to con you. That is in
essence the classic Asch conformity experiment. In the basic
Asch paradigmxxiv, the participants — the real subjects and the
confederates — were all seated in a classroom. They were asked a
variety of questions about the lines such as how long is A,
compare the length of A to an everyday object, which line was
longer than the other, which lines were the same length, etc. The
group was told to announce their answers to each question out
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loud. The confederates always provided their answers before the

study participant, and always gave the same answer as each other.
They answered a few questions correctly but eventually began
providing incorrect responses.
In a control group, with no pressure to conform to an erroneous
view, only one subject out of 35 never gave an incorrect answer.
Solomon Asch hypothesized that the majority of people would not
conform to something obviously wrong; however, when
surrounded by individuals all voicing an incorrect answer,
participants provided incorrect responses on a high proportion of
the questions (32%). Seventy-five percent of the participants gave
an incorrect answer to at least one question.
In the Asch conformity experiment, perceptions did not lie,
although the perception of what response was necessary
was a lie. The subject has no explanation for the behavior of
his peers, but relented to their pressure because as a rule of
thumb, his peers obviously knew best. But what if the lines
were concealed behind separate curtains, never to be
revealed? If the crowd assuredly pointed to one of the
curtains, we would likely follow as a matter of faith. And
indeed that is what having a faith is, a heuristic conclusion
that your trusted peers can’t be wrong. Extend this principle
to religious or political faiths, and one notes the persuasive
power of decisions that cannot be explained.
When rules of thumb derive not from explanation but from
mere correlation (e.g., my friends repeatedly do not steer
me wrong.), you are using inductive principles. These
principles can steer you right, or as the Asch experiment
demonstrates, badly wrong. Similarly, why we use the
internet is driven by inductive principles that without
explanation lead you to assume that the choices of your
peers are right, and fail to question if they have an ulterior
motive. And the results are invariably that we are left with the
short end of the stick.
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Plato’s Garbage Pile

The internet is a distraction medium par excellence, as it can
sidetrack you to areas that scarcely reflect your main
interests at hand. But even if we keep our focus on the
straight and narrow, in lieu of making our attention roam
wide, the internet can make our attention long. This may
represent the most insidious distraction of all. Defined as a
transformational distraction, our engagement with
information may extend beyond the usefulness of that
information. This is particularly the case with internet use,
as an article on a topic is often nested with links and
sidebars that contain other similar articles on the same topic.
As we move from one article to the other, the marginal
usefulness of each article declines, and the productive use
of our time dramatically declines as we dwell on not on a
theme, but variations of a theme.
For example, consider a shopper going to Wal-Mart in
search of a couple of tomatoes. Upon quickly finding his
perfect, ripe red veggies (fruit actually), his attention is
drawn to the other tomatoes in the aisle that are a bit
overripe. Soon his attention moves again to a row of spoiled
tomatoes, and then finally to a bushel of rotten tomatoes. He
becomes eventually up to his ears in tomatoes, entranced
not so much by their ripeness but by the novelty of their
rottenness.
Now consider an individual who wants to go out to the
movies. Wanting to note the critical opinion on a specific
film, he goes to the website ‘Rotten Tomatoes’. The site,
which contains scores of reviews for individual films, gives
him fresh information on the quality of the film. But other
reviews of the site’s page remain compelling, even if the
information is redundant and stale. But our information
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shopper persists, accessing even more reviews as the

quality of the information becomes progressively more stale
and ‘rotten’.
In hindsight, both shoppers would have been better off
searching in a smaller venue such as a farmer’s market or
local newspaper. They would have gotten good tomatoes
and good movie reviews, and not have wasted time with
the diminishing returns of looking at fruit or film reviews
that have less and less useful knowledge to give. When we
apply the moral of this story to the internet, we note that the
internet is super in finding important things that with slight
variations endlessly repeat themselves. We hook on to the
variation, but forget the fact that the information is
redundant, and is likely as stale as a three week old tomato.

Plato’s Garbage Pile

So if you are looking about facts about the economy, a

Mideast war, a football game, or whatever, you will find a
pile of facts that have as much enduring value as a bushel
or rotten tomatoes. You are what you eat, and you are also
what you learn. And if you end up consuming a lot of
redundant information only to learn scarcely nothing more
for your trouble, you’ve just filled up on virtual garbage.
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Procrastination and the spell

of danger
When we go to the movies, it’s often in the nick of time
before the feature starts. And when the feature does start,
we take pleasure and excitement in watching folks do
things once again in the nick of time. Consider the
proverbial time bomb. It is a metaphor for plot lines like
getting the girl, solving the crime, averting the fire, saving
the planet, and of course defusing the bomb when there is
literally no time to spare. Miss the deadline and there will
be a proverbial or actual explosion that will render the hero
and all the good things he stands for into a pile of dust.
That’s what makes drama so dramatic, the fact that the
outcome is always uncertain until a resolution comes in the
nick of time. Identifying with our hero in the cinema means
putting ourselves in his place, and this cinematic empathy
can drive us to tears, horror, disgust, or delight, but
underscoring it all is a need for our undivided attention.
The easiest way to do that is to literally wait until the last
minute, or preferably, the last second. But that of course is
courting danger, and danger is something that we
presumably are instinctively geared to avoid or flee through
the intervention of a ‘hard wired’ stress response, with the
result that danger would be something we would
continually want to avoid. But we don’t, and that’s the rub.
The fact that we wait until the last minute to get things done
means that we are actively putting ourselves into stressful
or near stressful situations that we by all accounts should
wish to avoid. But how can this be? Like a moth to the flame
we are at once attracted and repelled by danger, but the
problem and irony is that we couldn’t be motivated to do
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things otherwise. Danger increases risk, and risk embodies

the prospect of uncertainty, and it is precisely this fact that
makes us attentively aroused and more attuned to the task
at hand. But with it, we are also incented to stay the course
of being uncertain. That is the property of the neuro-
modulator dopamine, which primes us to be alert and
imparts incentive value to moment to moment behavior.
But because dopamine only increases the value of
momentary behavior, it can act at cross purposes to our long
term interests. Hence we often procrastinate to be attentive,
a state of mind that is dependent upon the uncertainty of
the moment but ignorant of the long-term prospects of
behavior irrespective of their danger.

Motivation is da bomb!

But what is procrastination? Simple definitions of

procrastination mean to postpone activities until another time.
Of course, that by definition covers everything you postpone,
whether it’s logical or not. So if to order our daily schedule
means to do one thing in deference or postponement of
another, that means that our whole life is spend
procrastinating, which is absurd. A better definition is
provided by the Oxford Dictionary, which holds that
“Procrastination is a postponement, often with the sense of
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deferring though indecision, when early action would have been

preferable," or as "deferring action, especially without good
reason." xxv The concept that procrastination is an inherently
unreasonable thing has been echoed by many punditsxxvi xxvii
xxviii xxix, who concur that procrastination is the irrational

delay of behavior.
At root however this definition is nonsense, for even
irrational behavior must have a reason to be. It’s only when
behavior doesn’t fit our prized model that we curse the
agent rather than the explanation, but the faulty explanation
always loses. Consider the behavior of the solar system. The
fact that it didn’t conform to the model that put the earth in
the center of the universe didn’t make the planetary
motions irrational, and even faulting the God for bad design
principles couldn’t escape from the fact that the world
worked in mysterious but not irrational ways. As creatures
who embody the natural world, the conclusion is the same.
Humans act in mysterious but not quite irrational ways, and
behavior must serve reasons both obvious and subtle, as
there is nothing nutty under the sun. The point therefore is
not to decry the unreasonableness of procrastination, but
investigating why for us common folks procrastination is
often not an unreasonable but a necessary and rational
thing.
Consider the fact that we don’t work when we are sleepy,
hungry, or are under the sun, and generally wait until a
time when we are rested, sated, or in the cool of the evening.
We do this because at a later time we can work faster, more
comfortably, and with more alertness and attention to our
job. In these cases, ‘procrastination’ is rather a justifiable
delay. Procrastination can also be a reasonable thing if we
consciously or non-consciously postpone an action in order
to inject an element of risk into behavior. Since risk increases
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dopamine release that corresponds with positive affect and

attentive alertness, procrastination can actually increase the
effectiveness of behavior. In other words, procrastination is
a reasonable thing if it represents the non conscious
manipulation of affect to increase effectiveness, whereas
procrastination due to distraction or the apprehension of
pain (e.g. putting off a dental appointment) simply reduces
effectiveness. But both are reasonable in their own way, as
procrastination may serve both approach and avoidance.
Ultimately, doing things effectively means doing things
affectively, and that often means acting just in time. The non-
reasonableness of behavior is an aspect of everything we do
because motivation requires activation, and this means
affect. In other words, to be effective we must be affective,
and affect never falls within ‘good reason’ unless there is
good reason to manipulate affect. Ultimately,
procrastination implies irrationality, but irrationality occurs
when we ignore reasonable causes, and when affect is left
out of the picture of human behavior we are left confused
and needful of a title to describe how timeliness of behavior
cannot be predicted by the reasonableness of behavior. Thus
procrastination is not an artifact of behavior, but of our
ignorance of how motivation works.
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Psychology goes Nova

Mark Twain once remarked that the United States is special
because its people possess the one true faith, several
hundred of them. Likewise, for the social sciences, the
United States is special because its academics possess the
one true explanation, numbering also in the hundreds.
Of course, practical people that we are, we have the one true
answer to this babel of opinion. We ignore it, unless of
course it proves useful. If the explanation proves
vicariously useful, we have superstition, and give some
credence to the predictive power of black cats, the
astrological significance of the movement of planets, and of
saying lots of prayers to St. Jude. If its practically useful, it
becomes common sense, and has no author.
But for psychologists and their pet schools of thought,
usefulness is neither practical or vicarious, it is precarious. In
other words, if you are psychologist with a Freudian,
behaviorist, or some other point of view, its predictions
sound just swell, until of course they fail to test out. It is then
that like a hot gaseous star that has burned off its fuel (or for
a school of psychology, its credibility), it will collapse upon
itself and explode, leaving a white dwarf that represents a
puny beacon signaling the star's former ethereal greatness.
And this is exactly what we have for once influential
(transactional analysis anyone?) psychological points of
view that faintly glimmer in the minds of a few remnant
true believers.
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Evolutionary Psychology goes Boom!

This astronomical fact serves as a swell metaphor for

psychology and the invariable schools of thought from time
to time that swell up to give us 'the answer', describing
human behavior in all its cantankerousness. From
psychoanalysis to behaviorism and as of late, dubious
schools of thought such as evolutionary psychology and
relational frame theory, they are puffed up with hot gas that
invariably blows up under the weight of its useless and
contrary data.
Which brings us to pop psychology, which compared to hi-
falutin concepts in psychology, quickly blazes into glory
and fades away as rapidly. As a comet is a celestial low life,
so too is pop psychology a philosophical low life.
Nonetheless, for a bright brief second, it also lights up the
sky, and gets into the newspapers and an appearance on
Oprah. But just as quickly, the comet passes by. We realize
then that it was just an overheated block of ice, and that we
were blockheads to believe. But that's ok, as the author of
the flash in the pan comes back a few years later with a new
lexicon and reinvents the philosophical wheel, and for one
brief moment, lights up the sky.
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Regression towards
Meanness
So the BCS won't cotton to a play off for college football
teams.

Well, that's plain mean, which is after all, the point.

Actually, the BCS methodology for determining top teams,

involving polling, computer analysis, and a coin flip here
and there is a much more equitable way of determining top
teams than a play off. And here's why.
Consider if you would a simple roll of a die. Cast it a few
times and the average result would likely be skewed from
one to six. Over time and trials, the mean should always
arrive at about three, and given this mediocrity principle,
one can pretty reliably predict what the average value for a
die roll will be.
Similarly, if you have the luxury of having a playoff series
where the same two teams play a best of seven, then you are
more likely to arrive at a true champion than if only one
game was played. One can picture the howls decrying
unfairness if the World Series was merely a series of one.
The mediocrity principle is everywhere we look, as we
gauge our intelligence, accomplishments, or good fortune
not on one instance, but on the average of many. It's the
reason that we can survive in the face of adversity, because
we know the law of averages. Sports should be no different,
but given time and expense, we have to settle for one playoff
game whose results are no more representative of the truth
than the mere role of a die.
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Logically, a computer can average it all out, and come up

with a nice averaged answer. A true enough result, but
mediocre, and that depressing predictability is something
that games are not set out to do.
Thus, the next time you are rooting for the home team,
know that if the winner is beforehand unpredictable, then
it's not really a winner until it represents a predictable state
of affairs. A mediocre outcome certainly, but mediocrity is
after all the shade of the truth.
 172

Searching for Red Stockings: The Myth of

Information Overload
As the internet advocate Clay Shirky noted, everybody who
talks about information overload starts with the graph with
the telltale ascending line and the litany of the troubles it
entails. As the line informs us, information is increasing
exponentially, and we can barely deal with it intellectually
and emotionally, or more and more often, we can’t. And the
solution? It is here that the rallying cries diverge.

Scary Graph

On one side there is Shirky, who assigns the problem to

filter failure, and why not? It’s a reasonable thing after all to
suppose that if we had better ways to sort out information,
we could cull the bad from the good, and be able to
significantly reduce the information we have to cope with
daily. Search, social media, and e-commerce firms of course
concur, and are rapidly improving their search algorithms
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(using of course information about you that you voluntarily

or involuntarily port over to them) so you can find what
you need the first time.
On the other hand is the internet critic Nicolas Carr, who
attributes information overload to filter success. In Carr’s
opinion our filters are working all too well, and the problem
is that they are getting better and better. Thus,
“….The real source of information overload…. is the stuff
we like, the stuff we want. And as filters get better, that's
exactly the stuff we get more of.
It's a mistake, in short, to assume that as filters improve they
have the effect of reducing the information we have to look
at. As today's filters improve, they expand the information
we feel compelled to take notice of. Yes, they winnow out
the uninteresting stuff (imperfectly), but they deliver a
vastly greater supply of interesting stuff. And precisely
because the information is of interest to us, we feel pressure
to attend to it. As a result, our sense of overload increases.”
Implicit in both arguments is this premise:
The information we want is the same as the information
we need.
This is an argument for the curing salve of better filters (to
fine tune what we want, since our wants are finite) or a call
for mass despair (because our wants are infinite, and thus
overwhelm us when they are invariably served by the web).
This premise derives from an assumption that in our hubris
we are wont to make: that humans are rational agents that
know what they want and why.
But what if this was not true? What if we are at root
irrational creatures who delude ourselves into thinking that
we know what we want and why we want it? What if the
information we want is more often than not different from
the information we need? If this is true, then to paraphrase
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Shakespeare, our fate is not in the stars (or rather the cloud),
but in ourselves, because if the information that we want is
often not the same as the information we need, then we need
to be aware how to distinguish our wants from our needs
and how to constrain the former. In other words, for
information overload, the key is to understand how our
basic motivations work.
The question that Shirky and Carr beg is thus elemental:
Why is information of interest to us, because it is important, or
because of something else? To answer this question, let us
illustrate how a basic search was performed over the last
few generations by going to our metaphorical sock drawer
in search of red stockings.
It’s 1912, and you as t-shirt manufacturer want to begin a
production run of commemorative t-shirts of the Boston
Red Stockings triumph in the World Series. As soon as the
game is over you receive an immediate telegraph of their
victory, and it’s off to the races to start production.
It’s 1932, and you as a t- shirt manufacturer want to get
started with your commemorative t-shirt run, and so you
listen to the game on the radio, and upon its completion, get
to work.
It’s 2012, and you as a t-shirt manufacturer want get to
cracking on your production run celebrating the Boston Red
Sox victory, and you follow the sox from college draft to
preseason to all of their games through the World Series,
and monitor all the social and news media who have
something to say about it.
In all three time frames, the decision point happens in a
second at a predetermined moment, namely when
(hopefully) the sox win. The narrative of how that final fact
(a sox victory in the final game) got there is irrelevant. No
matter what era, the decision point is concise, precise, and
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momentary, and gets to you on time regardless of the media

you use and irrespective of its background story. There is
no need to follow the narrative that describes the changing
facts that get us to that point, as the point of the last man
flying out in the last inning is all we need.
The difference between the three eras is that in the first era
we could not follow the narrative that follows the sox on
their way to the pennant, but in the latter era we could. But
following the latter comes at a cost. By following the
progress of the sox we become diverted from other things
of value, and suffer regret. If these diversions are small
scale and populate our working day, they become
distractions and cause us to lose focus and attention.
Finally, as we continually choose between distraction and
staying on course, we become tense and nervous.
The metaphor of ‘information overload’ would seem to
apply here, as every frame of every moment of the
continuous narrative leading to the Red Sox pennant can
and is considered by the sox fan. However, like a strip of
static frames in a motion picture that give rise to a sense of
movement or motion, the story is interesting because of the
novel ways the narrative changes, and it is the changes that
compel. Thus, although the ending is necessary for us to go
about our business, the story that leads to it is compelling
not because of what it is, but how it is continually
transformed.
We can expand our simple red sox narrative to the
narratives embedded in all the things we do that are being
progressively revealed by the web. We need to know facts,
but what obsesses us is the narrative or story that brings us
to those facts. The internet produces not just more
information, but more narratives of information. We see not
a picture, but a movie, not a note, but a score, not a phrase
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but a speech. Moreover, we conflate the importance of the

narrative with the significance of its conclusion, or what we
want with what we need. This is a dangerous delusion, for
the stuff we want depends upon the narrative or facts in
motion, but the stuff we need depends upon the facts sitting
still.
We can get the facts we daily need in a half hour, but
continually accessing the web to see a moving stock market,
middle east crisis, or what Uncle Charlie is up to are never
ending stories that excite us, engage us, but ultimately bring
us down. A narrative is of course still important if our
behavior necessarily changes in tandem. In this case the
narrative is ‘feedback’. Thus, a quarterback’s performance
is determined by feedback during the moment to moment
course of the game. However, for the stadium audience, this
feedback is entertainment, and for those who attend to the
ever expanding narrative on the game itself, an unnecessary
obsession.

The Myth of Information Overload

As a metaphor, information overload attributes the
psychological effects of the internet to what information is
rather than how it is arranged. But humans are above all
novelty-seeking creatures, and novelty is enhanced not in
the facts but in the stories they tell. Because the explanation
for how the web influences us psychologically is based on
core assumptions on human motivation that are faulty, we
proceed with our daily lives under a dangerous illusion
abetted unfortunately by the perverse incentives of our
media providers to keep us hanging onto the story when the
conclusion is all we need. Whether or not we can escape this
illusion and its dire consequences depends ultimately on a
better story.
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Shakespeare and the

Turtle
Once upon a time, William Shakespeare was walking on
Stratford Street, across from Avon. He stopped at the curb,
and slowly, a turtle passed by him and began to cross the
street.
As the turtle crawled into the distance, Shakespeare turned
to hear an idling crowd. Go walk and get the turtle, they
said, and we shall applaud.
A theater manager, knowing a good thing when he saw it,
said skip to the turtle and I will pay you money.
A pretty girl in the crowd then said, twirl as you walk and I
will kiss you!
A man then cried out, reach the turtle before I do and you
will be a better man than I.
Then he heard from the palace window the Queen, who said
hop to the turtle and I will make you a knight!
Several friends beckoned to him. And show us moves that
we can perform with similar acclaim!
Finally, a ghost appeared to him, and said to Shakespeare,
make it all original, and I the ghost of posterity will
remember you.
And so Shakespeare pondered for some time the diverse
requests of his audience, and with budding excitement
came to a solution. Then, in a balletic motion that would do
Balanchine proud, he walked and he ran and he twirled and
he hopped. He did it all with originality, with speed, and
with panache. And so his walk across the street became
choreography for the ages, and perhaps maybe, just maybe,
he even got the turtle.
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In the movie Shakespeare in Love, our hero was muddling

over a new play that was not coming on at all well. It was
titled 'Romeo and Ethel, the Pirates Daughter'. Burdened
with an uninspiring title and plot, he at first despaired of his
own genius. Inspiration of course came to the rescue, but
the muse was dressed in a dozen very different robes, and
represented the mundane things that filled his world. And
so were such inspirations cast as a crowd that demanded
sex and violence, a playhouse owner wanting a popular
play, a girlfriend longing for lines of romantic intimacy, a
Queen desiring pratfalls, and actors in his troupe clamoring
for good lines. And of course, for pride's sake he had to
surpass the efforts of his rival Christopher Marlowe, and
above it all, forever beckoning, was the specter of posterity.
With such inspiration, or rather, inspirations, Shakespeare
could not help but create works of surpassing genius, and
be charged with the motivation that created them. The
cauldron of genius is seasoned with a dozen motivations,
and the more diverse the demands, the greater heights does
it vault. Genius requires not an audience, but audiences,
and it is diverse demand that is the spark of motivation that
electrifies the mind. Educational psychologists would do
well to learn this lesson, that genius comes when it is
wanted, from everywhere.
Note: Oh yes. And the real Shakespeare? Consider an
environment full of external motivators for a pastime as
addictive to its age as our time is for television. To quote
Daniel Boorstin’s book ‘The Creators’ (pp.307-310): "The
theater had risen in London during Shakespeare’s youth.
The suddenness with which the new pastime had appeared
raised the alarm of the learned and the pious. Like television
in our time, theater acquired its frightening popularity
within a half century." "…..In two weeks during the 1596
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season a Londoner could have seen eleven performances of

ten different plays at one playhouse, and on no day would
he have had to see a repeat performance of the day
before."…."Of the twelve hundred plays offered in London
theaters in the half century before 1590, some nine hundred
were the work of about fifty professional playwrights." (It
should be noted that the London of 1590 had about the
population of present day Jackson, Mississippi!!) This
author wonders what a Vesuvius of inspiration would
follow if present day authors had such willing ears, and
what any of us would trade for such extrinsic motivation!)
 180

Stalin’s Maxim
“The death of one is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic.”
Josef Stalin

What is the future of the republic? It’s smart phone enabled,

that’s what. We start with the future inaugural of a new
president, and then track back, way back, until we stop at
the president’s soon to be dad, using his smart phone to
book a ticket on the outbound train so he can just in time
introduce himself to the president’s soon to be mom.
Moral of the story: AT&T and Blackberry Smart Phone:
Your future enabled!

Back to the future app

When the hype machine morphs into a time machine, we

know we have problems. In the blissful world of Web 2.0,
we are in touch continually, simultaneously, productively,
and happily with everything that counts everywhere. And
we are constantly reminded of this great boon through the
flash of sights and sounds and breathless imagery of
nonstop advertising and bleeping reminders. Now,
tethered to our i-phones, pads, pods, and assorted
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information appliances, it’s not just you, but the Web 2!

However, bring your appliances to work and have them
enabled for you at work is akin to ‘bring your daughter,
puppy, or mother in law to work day’. Needless to say, you
won’t get that much done. Unfortunately, there’s no profit
to device manufacturers, content providers, and software
developers in telling you differently, until you realize it the
hard way when your company shows ‘no profit’.
And then there are statistics, statistics, and more damn
statistics. The web is a distracter mechanism par excellence,
and to how measure distracters on the web take their toll on
the productivity of homo-sapiens in his working habitat,
you simply add them up. It’s all in the numbers.

Stat Sheet

So, on average, 28% of our time at work is spent wasting

timexxx. Sounds bad, until you realize that averages have a
way of getting away from you because deep down, they
aren’t you! Thus we know that half of us are over weight,
most of us are too stressed, and nearly all of us waste too
much time. But so what? Against the dead hand of numbers
and percentages are those everyday experiences of you and
I who use the web to get the score, settle a score, or in the
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case of our stranger on a train, just score. Individual

experiences trump statistics, even though in the end we all
become one of them. Statistics are an ineffective
counterweight against the immediate pull of personal
experience, and inverts Stalin’s maxim for a new score of
happy victims. One may say in these gentler times on
internet omniscience that a simple search is a happy fact,
but that the inconvenience and suffering wrought by
millions of them is but an unhappy statistic.
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A Sticky Medium
The web is a sticky thing, which means you stick with it
from hyperlink to hyperlink as you start out looking for a
chicken recipe and end up looking at pictures of polar bears.
But webs after all are meant to keep you stuck in place. At
least, that’s the spider’s plan. If anything, the web is a very
sticky place that sends you careening to and fro in
cyberspace like a hyper-kinetic pinball, while you all the
while remain stuck in the medium. For the reasons we have
discussed, the web cried out for borders, constraints, or at
the very least a five ball limit. Of course they don’t

Your brain on the internet

call them hyper-links ‘hyper’ for nothing, and there is no

software fix that can shut down your fix before you go off
exploring for polar bears. There is of course a solution, just
change your search medium to one that’s truly un-sticky, a
simple medium that focuses on the subject matter of interest
to you, and has a finite supply of ‘links’ to other similar and
dissimilar subject matter. It’s old-fashioned stuff that is
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portable, insightful, keeps on message, and is sadly on the

way to extinction.
It is the magazine, newspaper, and good old fashioned
hardbound book. Unlike the web it doesn’t provide you
variations on a theme, just the theme. So you have to make
do with one article on a topic, not four hundred, one movie
review, not fifty, and if you want to share your opinion,
your spouse or co-worker would just have to do.
This is nothing more than the economic law of diminishing
marginal returns in action, where the first choice is the best
because it gives you most of what you need the first time.
Thus, the first movie review is enlightening, but succeeding
ones are progressively less so, until you read them merely
for the odd turn of phrase.
The question is, do you want a redundant message or a
succinct one, or do you care more about how a message is
fashioned than what it says? The issue again is utility versus
novelty. Media such as magazines and newspapers
maximize utility and constrain novelty, and when they have
their say, there is no space left for a variant on the theme
which adds nothing but variations in grammar. Utility
trumps novelty, and all because of the unintended
consequences of the price of newsprint. And why should we
value this when internet diversion awaits? Ultimately, it is
because our time is valuable, and to use time well we must
cordon off our pleasures as well as our pains. A measured
life, a life of proportion and balance is mediated by the very
boundaries inherent in the things we do from an afternoon
football game to an eight hour day to even the simplest
pleasures of reading a book or magazine. When it is done it
is done, and we become unstuck until another day.
 185

Tiger Woods vs. One Billion

Monkeys

Consider a hole of golf with Tiger Woods pitted against one

billion monkeys. Besides the fact that a billion monkeys, if
given enough time and typewriters, can hammer out all of
the plays of Shakespeare, it stands to reason given an
eternity or so that they wouldn't be all too shabby at golf
either. Assuming that one billion monkeys at the 18th hole
equal the efforts of one monkey making his billionth
attempt at a par four, then you can be pretty sure that at
least one of the little fellows will finish the hole with a score
superior to Tiger.
So what are we to make of our triumphant little duffer? You
can conclude that there is something special about the
monkey that makes him better than Tiger, or that perhaps
he merely was lucky, given of course the billion to one odds.
Playing the hole again would of course prove no contest, as
the little simian would regress back to the mean of his peers,
 186

which should be around 500,000 strokes per hole, at least.

Still, one can be left with the opinion that there was
something to be said about the monkey's skill, in spite of the
fact that there was no explaining his accomplishment
outside of pure blind luck. This predilection to derive
lawfulness from simple correlations or patterns represents
the problem of induction. Induction is defined as the
imputation of lawfulness from a limited or token number of
phenomenal patterns. And it is also at root, illogical. Thus,
to follow the argument of the philosopher David Hume,
noticing that the sun rises day after day leads one to imputes
a lawfulness (i.e. the sun will rise each dawn forever) to the
state of affairs that does not logically follow from that
observation. It just takes one example of the sun not rising
for such a law to be refuted, something that such a 'law'
cannot guarantee.
But logic has never stopped one type of monkey, namely
homo-sapiens, from seeing lawfulness in all sorts of
correlations. From tea leaves to the movements of the
planets, there is always some type of correlation between
physical events and behavior that can ascend to the realm
of law. Nowadays, we've progressed from the days of
reading goat entrails, and have new correlations that map
the order of our personal worlds. This psycho-logical
(actually an oxymoron) way of looking at things give us
new laws of behavior, all of course that follow from simple
correlations. Psychologists love correlation, which like
scripture can be interpreted for their own, often devilish
purposes. Indeed, correlations are embedded in the very
way psychologists do science, as they statistically correlate
one set of observations with another to find with the
assurance of a court astrologer the psychological laws that
like the stars, rule our behavior. But simple correlations and
 187

the rules they engender are merely ways of explaining

things on the cheap, and as with anything that comes cheap,
you get what you pay for. Indeed, with such an easy
currency of 'knowing', no one really gets to know anything,
as the cacophony of psychological laws, from the
psychoanalytic to the evolutionary attest.
For any aspect of behavior, a true explanation must look at
all the things in the shadows, the events that vault from
mere uni-dimensional correlation to reflect the true multi-
dimensional mechanics of the world. Thus a problem of
behavior must be examined from all vantages. A true
psychological explanation therefore imputes order or
lawfulness from an examination of all the phenomenal
patterns of the world, from the qualia of experience (pain,
pleasure), to behavioral (what we do), cognitive (what we
think), neurological and biological events. By considering
all the possibilities, there is no extraneous possibility that
can intrude, and make a sunless dawn. But this requires a
bit of modesty, a healthy dose of self criticism, and an
awareness that the truth most likely lurks not in our hubris,
but in the shadows. Characteristics which alas are in short
supply when one reads the rambling and transient
certitudes of psychology.
 188

Utopia is nowhere, thank

goodness
It is a perfect world, having what we please. It is unknown
to man, yet the object of an eternal and futile quest. It is
Utopia, literally nowhere. Not so for our mammalian
cousins, where only abundant fields will do. It is all a matter
of incentive, and with animals it becomes transparently
clear. The ability to forage, to roam, and to anticipate are
rudimentary yet crucial ingredients for survival. But even
for simple brains, perceptions have to shine above others,
otherwise one would focus on everything, and get quite
literally, nowhere. And so the simple cognitive maps,
illuminated and selected by attention are necessary novel
and positive things. Experience or learning is molded by
such ideas that to our animal cousins can be configured into
points on a grid. Thus B follows A, a mouse follows a scent,
explores an unknown trail, and maps out the world in
simple dimensions. Thus a happy animal in its heaven of
heavens is an eternal forager, continually projecting
forward, perhaps for a millisecond, an enticing and
expectant future.
If it were only so simple for homo-sapiens. We are, or seem
to be, entirely different. What's the difference between us
and our pet cat? A bigger brain of course, but more
specifically, a bigger part of our brain. An expanded
cerebral cortex, or forebrain, provides us with the
computational space not just to ponder, but to render. Thus
the dreamer could dream he was dreaming in infinite
recursion. Yet the emotional circuitry that governs our
drives remained deeply embedded and essentially
unchanged. Value, and in particular human value, was
 189

carved out of this thinking stuff and became unique to all

the world. We think of it as emergent, like a bubble
ascending from froth, or consciousness arising from the
dance of a billion neurons. But is value indeed something
new and emergent, or is it a foraging response that is
twisted in time and place by the metaphors of thought?

Topology

Consider a torus, a continuous three-dimensional loop.

Twist it like a balloon into a plaything, and it emerges as a
dog, but its topology or essential state remains the same.
For our mammalian cousins, the topology of motivation is
simple: time, motion, and circumstance occur as a fixed
arrow. There is no contemplation of alternatives, no
rumination over lost opportunities, no measure of the
branching possibilities that could be. Behavior is
unremarkable, predictable, and the circle of life is a
continuous recursion, moving in an eternal circle at once
and never the same.
For humans, circles are dull things; we prefer instead a more
convoluted path that we can twist backwards and forwards
in time, map multiplying possibilities that elude
apprehension, and see untold futures even in the
 190

movements of stars. With a larger brain, nature has given

us the opportunity to virtualize the possibilities, and to act
in mind all eventualities as if they were real. Like a torus
twisted into an animal, a foraging field becomes a field of
dreams, and though it may seem a distinctive thing as a
giraffe emerging from a twisted balloon, its topology or
essence remains the same.
Consider a bear running in a field a hundred by thirty yards
square. He can see ahead perhaps for a second, and map in
his mind a limited set of moves that are suggested and
constrained by a scent, a sound, or the notice of a rustle in
the leaves. But what if in his mind’s eye he could see more?
Spontaneous movements can become coordinated tactics,
all played out as what-ifs in the bears mind. Run right, run
left, fake out prey with a sudden move, elude rivals with a
dodge and a spurt of speed, and all replayable in memory
for future edification and regret. And all of this measured
against a host of imponderables faintly modeled that
suggest future mating success, a suitable cave, and the
regard of other bears and animals in the forest. The ability
to render mere possibilities twists a simple sensitivity to
new and important things into a game, a sport, or an entire
culture, as the bear if it had a mind morphs into a Chicago
Bear. With the virtual possibilities bestowed by a mind, all
things delightful become illuminated by the mere
contortion of a tease, which for mammals with a mind stirs
the grandest dreams of a forager eternal.
 191

Vespasian and the

Machine
In the first century A.D., the Roman emperor Vespasian was
presented with a machine replete with levers, pulleys and
gears that would greatly automate the construction of
public works. He waved off the opportunity with the
observation, “and then what would the displaced workers
do?” This is a question asked by a Luddite, who assumed
that free time left folks with little to do, and was answered
by the free market, which always found them something
better to do. And so it went. Manual workers became
knowledge workers, and work itself became more
interesting, healthier, remunerative, and meaningful. This
is a fine state of affairs, until creativity goes the way of the
ancient stone mason, and is replaced by a machine that
cannot be waved off.
Although the present of the internet serves mankind, the
future of the internet is made for a certain brand of human
being that ain’t us, and that’s because the future internet
will take away our ‘brand’. Homo-sapiens after all means
wise man, but if wisdom itself is automated, we lose half
our name and all of our soul. And it will do this by not by
speeding up the search for new information, but by
speeding up the creation of new knowledge. Sorting stuff
and even finding stuff is predictable and dull. It is an
accountant’s trade, but even accountants earn their pay be
being creative. The linear, repetitive, and predictable is the
stuff for calculators, not people. Little do we think that
computers will soon be calculating in creative ways as well,
 192

but that is where we are headed in direction if not yet in

factxxxi, and when they do mankind will cease to be wise.
Certainly, almost all popular, scientific, and literary opinion
doesn’t see this coming or accept its true implications,
although these are clearly in the technological cards. Almost
all of the vivid prognostications of the future, whether it be
the futures predicted by science fiction or science fact keep
sacrosanct the creative human mind. In our literary
tradition, even intelligent machines aren’t that creative, and
are taught the error of their intellectual hubris by literally
pulling their plug. Literary and cinematic folklore presume
that this is hard to do as the machines automatically figure
that this is something we will invariably want to do, and
understandably resist; witness Hal the computer among a
long list of intransigent machines who will not go lightly
into the disconnected night.
So far, computers allow us to be more productive, healthier,
intelligent, and creative. But their intelligence lies in
manipulating knowledge, not creating knowledge.
However, if and when they learn to be creative, at once they
will put us all out of work, and finally confirm Vespasian’s
fear, not that workers have nothing to do, but that they have
nothing meaningful left to do. But what may literally
happen when all creation flowers in a day?
 193

We can forget it for you

wholesale
It was meant to be just a night out with the boys, and
bowling at that. But these were no ordinary chums, but a
group of wayward dwarves. And where was the location of
the bowling alley, how about that cloud on the left, just
follow the thunder. Well, to old Rip, it seemed like he was
there only a short time, but as they say, time flies when
you’re having fun.
And when he settled afterwards in a nap, time flew. Perhaps
it was the nap, perhaps it was the game, but when he awoke,
generations had past, and Rip Van Winkle, the loyal subject
to the English crown woke to a new world, and a new
United States. And so, with King George forgotten to all as
was his kith and kin, he found his lost daughter, and passed
his remaining days full of memories of simpler days when
time had measure and substance and meaning.
Time is money, but time is also memory. In the past the
argument to spend one’s time was pecuniary, in the future
is may be regarded as the stuff of life. Without memory time
vanishes, and when memory is truncated our lives lose
meaning because meaning devolves into a void and a blur.
In Philip K. Dick’s novelette ‘We can remember it for you
wholesale’ (later morphed into the movie ‘Total Recall’,
time was memory, so that life seemed longer and certainly
more interesting when your noggin was injected with
fabricated memories. Unfortunately, we can’t add
memories except through actually doing things, but we sure
can eliminate them and speed up their passage. And now
on the internet, we can do it wholesale!
 194

RIP

Consider two mind experiments we inflict upon our minds

all the time.
Time Erasure Experiment #1
You go to a party, and invariably meet a long line of your
spouse’s friends, one by one they tell you their names,
which or course you immediately forget.
Time Erasure Experiment #2
On Monday you begin playing Halo Fantasy XXIII on your
computer. Blink your eyes, and its Tuesday.
In both experiments we are doing everything so quickly
each short term memory is pushed aside by the next
meaningful sight or sound before it can register in long term
memory, so time flies because we literally can’t remember
different times. In the first experiment, the memory loss is
piecemeal; in the latter it is wholesale. This is why taking a
break assists memory when it is a mere pause in behaving,
but hinders memory when it is not a pause from behavior
but a different behavior entire. Further, when memory
falters, so does time, and we wonder when we are because
we cannot recall where we have been.
 195

Moral, when you go from daylight savings time to internet

time, your time is not just spent, it is lost, and your life is
shortened to that of a mayfly. So, if you’re not careful, you
may wake up some morning and find out that you have a
proverbial long white beard and live in the Peoples
Republic of America.
(But of course if you don’t want to listen to this, you can just
forget it!)
 196

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 201

Other open-source books by this author, free for all.

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The Book of Rest: The Odd Psychology of Doing ‘Nothing’ The
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A Mouse’s Tale … a practical explanation and handbook of
motivation from the perspective of a humble creature An
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and a handbook to show you how it works, from individuals to
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https://www.scribd.com/document/389107357/IT-bytes-Giving-
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Dr Mezmer’s Dictionary of Bad Psychology Bad psychology
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https://www.scribd.com/document/389679836/Dr-Mezmer-s-
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Dr. Mezmer’s Psychopedia of Bad Psychology Everything you
didn't want to know and more about your favorite non science
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https://www.scribd.com/doc/16345689/Dr-Mezmer-s-
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universes, alcoholic AI, evil Russians, galactic empires, death
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spaceships, Wal Mart shoppers, God, and everyone dies at the
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Mechanica Bollix and Lucilius are brilliant engineers who just
happen to be robots. Called "mech-anics" (because they can
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https://www.scribd.com/document/318278089/Mechanica-
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time forgot, and on purpose. Follow Who Dat as he saves his
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https://www.scribd.com/document/396600499/Who-Dat-
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Also at ajmarr3@gmail.com