Swimming in the Fifth Dimension

I like to think about people jumping (or being forced) out of their goldfish bowls of certainty. The sun revolved around the earth, until it didn’t. The earth was flat, until it wasn’t.

Paradigm shifts, in other words. When the aliens arrive, or we go there. When neutrinos go faster than light (maybe).

Last week, on Thursday, I had lunch with a friend who’d decided, for some reason I couldn’t quite figure out but which sounded like a good idea, to start doing things she hated. Like shopping, or reading historical novels or books about dreams.

I hate shopping and historical novels too, but I’m pretty interested in dreams. It’s so weird, making up all that stuff in the middle of the night when, by the looks of it, you might as well be unconscious.

So that was a fun conversation, talking about things we hated and why (she’s not interested in any of the things my erstwhile (and late) friend Connie used to call “the spooky stuff” – dreams, or telepathy, or God (my friend’s goldfish bowl is atheism.))

On Friday I walked with another friend, who told me about the time her partner’s obese mother got stuck in a bathtub and had to stay there till her caregivers arrived to haul her out. She (the obese mother) thought it was hilarious, laughing and laughing as they pulled her out.

On Saturday I got an email from my Thursday friend (whom I’d not spoken to since then). I quote:

After all my badmouthing of dreams, I had a weird one last night and told [her husband], who thought it was pretty funny. It involved a bunch of country dudes in their sixties, trying to heave a laughing, nude 300-pound woman out of a tub. Take that, Sigmund.

The scientists at CERN (maybe feeling a little defensive since they haven’t found the God particle yet) are busy coming to Einstein’s defense – like maybe the Opera physicists didn’t measure the neutrinos’ tunnel right, or maybe they forgot about tidal effects (I didn’t realize physicists could be so prosaic).

But I’m hoping what the guy (Joe Lykken) from Fermilab said is right:

“Special relativity only holds in flat space, so if there is a warped fifth dimension, it is possible that on other slices of it, the speed of light is different.”

And that in that warped fifth dimension, my Friday conversation met my friend’s dream.

Just keep believing

I keep thinking about those Singular computers, the ones Kurzweil thinks are working on getting smarter than us. They’ll be passing Turing Tests, convincing humans they’re human, maybe even enslaving us, but also doing all kinds of incredible things. According to Kurzweil:

My view is that the likely outcome is that on the one hand, from the perspective of biological humanity, these superhuman intelligences will appear to be their transcendent servants, satisfying their needs and desires. On the other hand, fulfilling the wishes of a revered biological legacy will occupy only a trivial portion of the intellectual power that the Singularity will bring.

Scary!

What will they look like? Watson on Jeopardy? Or like the big (probably a lot smaller by then) trailer that was the actual Watson?

Of course they’d have to conduct the Turing tests like an orchestra audition, where Watson would be behind a screen. (I’ve always wondered about those orchestra auditions, by the way – have you ever wondered how so many male flute players end up in orchestras?)

And what are they going to do with all that leftover intellectual power? Will they enslave us? Will they take us over, destroy our society?

Society, as John Tierney wrote in yesterday’s Times, depends on people behaving as if free will exists (there’s something kind of screwy about this logic: if you don’t believe in free will, you’re free to act with impunity?). But, accepting this for now, what does it take to behave as if free will exists? You have to believe in free will – in other words, you have to be conscious. And since no one knows how to create consciousness (well, except for the way you create babies), these machines aren’t going to be conscious (unless they’re so so smart they can create it in themselves). No free will, then. Our society is safe.

But what if they’re so smart they convince us free will is just a delusion?

Theodicy vs. the Singularity

The conventional religious explanations just don’t seem to work when it comes to Japan. Why three calamities, all at once? Because they were bad? Because life is suffering?

Better the more prosaic Stuff Happens. Because the earth’s plates moved and jostled the water and those power plants were in the wrong place.

But how about this. What if the Singularity (that moment, supposedly coming in 2045, when the computers we’ve built get smarter than we are) has already happened, somewhere else? What if the Singularians landed here and explained everything – they collided some stars and made a neat little world where creatures crawled out of oceans and came together in countries and tried out different ways of governing themselves and made art and music and fought wars – and everything was going along in a quite fascinating way until it seemed like too much went wrong all of a sudden in Japan.

We’re so sorry! they’d say. With this free will that God gave us, we’re not perfect.

I know, I’m just moving the Why question up a level. Ultimately, Stuff Just Happens, Stuff that’s beyond our (or the Singularians’) capability to understand.

Sleepwalking

Just in the past week I’ve found myself fumbling with the radio remote control, trying to stop a recording on my iPhone; and staring in horror at a Plexiglas panel filled with bugs that had somehow replaced my headboard.

I’ve taken drawers out of night tables, put my pillow on the roof, and scrabbled weirdly at my husband’s toes.

My son once walked his pillow to a rock next to the raging Colorado River, managed to find his way back to his cot next to us, and remembered none of it the following morning. On a trip to visit colleges, we awoke to find him fumbling at the motel room door. “What are you doing?” we asked.

“I have to go to college,” he replied, and went back to bed.

So I can sort of imagine what it was like to be Tobias Wong, who may have hung himself while sleepwalking. But I’ve always woken up, realized what I was doing didn’t make any sense, and gone back to sleep.

I wonder if he did too, in the moment before he died.

Hi there, Gurdjieff!

If you set your watch alarm (or, sorry, this sounds so old-fashioned now – your cell phone) to go off at random intervals, you’ll be practicing one of the esoteric techniques of the Russian philosopher Gurdjieff. Exercises like this were called The Work, and they were designed to lift people up out of the automatic unaware existence we all inhabit most of the time – daydreaming default mode, in more modern parlance.

Gurdjieff’s followers believed that little practices like this were part of “making a soul” and that if you worked hard enough at it you could get through that needle’s eye and eventually transcend bodily life, whatever that means.

If this is possible, I think Gurdjieff of all people must be up there somewhere feeling quite pleased about tomorrow’s global mosaic because, in order to do it right, everybody’s going to have to set up some sort of beeping in their lives tomorrow at 15:00 U.T.C. At that moment they’ll not only be “self-remembering” (which is one of those esoteric exercises), but trying to figure out what image represents that particular moment for them.

Stay tuned, set your personal remembering device, and try not to daydream.

Daydreaming default mode, Part 2

I’ve been thinking about words or turns of phrase that originally intrigued me but now irritate me, like “at the end of the day,” “that said,” “absolutely,” and one more that really captured me but that I’ve now totally forgotten. I stacked these phrases up in my mind as I was driving on what we call around here the Blue Route, because it was so controversial it existed only as a blue line on maps for thirty years. I’ve been wondering if that phrase would return to me if I re-drove that route, because, as I wrote the other day, my memory attaches to places; for example I can remember exactly where I was (in a conference room at the corporation where I worked for twenty years) when I first heard “at the end of the day,” spoken by a quite intimidating Englishwoman from our British affiliate, which probably explains why I found such a well-worn phrase intriguing at first, conjuring up apocalyptic visions of the world crashing down around us while we all sat around that conference room trying to figure out what the essence of what we were talking about was.

“That said” is like putting something in bold type – it emphasizes what the speaker just said, but the problem is that while you’re thinking about this, about what the speaker just said and about why he (it’s almost always a he) had to say “that said,” you forget to listen to what he’s saying next. This is not in person, mind you (another irritating phrase), because people rarely say “that said” in person – you hear it more on TV or on the radio, when people are called upon to pontificate; and so it’s much easier for your attention to wander, from the TV or radio, when the speaker isn’t there to see you musing absently over his turn of phrase.

And speaking of TV or radio: have you noticed how many times people being interviewed say “absolutely”?

And all of this, in case you haven’t noticed, illustrates my normal daydreaming default mode.

It is what it is.*

*Yes, that’s the phrase I forgot, and I didn’t even have to go back to the Blue Route.

We interrupt this program for a bit of theology

I was walking into a Catholic church with some friends. Everyone in the church had little squares of black material pressed to their faces. A priest reached inside his jacket and handed me a square. I asked my friend what this was; I’d never seen it before. She said they were inhaling the body of Christ.

Then a large screen came down and we all gathered around to watch a reality TV show.

I like that large screen; it’s what I’ve always believed. As P.D. Ouspensky wrote, in In Search of the Miraculous:

I already knew then as an undoubted fact that beyond the thin film of false reality there existed another reality from which, for some reason, something separated us.

Or, equally likely, religion is the reality TV show.

But the black square? I thought those odd, almost cannibalistic Catholic rituals were gone from my consciousness. It’s a handy little thing, though: you could keep it, and carry it around with you. Maybe the Church would like to borrow from my dream – except that if you had God with you all the time, you wouldn’t have to bother going back to church.

A very convoluted way to reintroduce Sam Parnia

When I was working on my book Celebrating Time, someone gave me a huge book called The Secret Language of Birthdays. At first I thought it was right up my alley: it has a page for every date of the year, with the astrological sign, associated planets, a list of people who were born on that day, a description of what all those people are supposedly like, and a little soupçon of advice.

I was hoping for, very unrealistically, something deductive: given the alignment of everything on this date, all the things that make it different from every other date, here’s what to expect, what people born on this date tend to have in common, etc. (I know that’s crazy.)

And so we come to today. They call it “the day of precognition.” Why? Well, we look over at the list of people born on this date and guess what? Both Emmanuel Swedenborg and Jules Verne were born on February 8. Now Jules Verne is the science fiction writer who predicted all kinds of things, like cars and rockets and air conditioning and television; and Swedenborg is the guy who saw a fire in Stockholm when he was over 200 miles away; learning, two days later, that there really had been a fire in Stockholm.

But this is inductive reasoning, working up to a generalization from particulars (not to mention all the perfectly ordinary people they ignored who were also born on this date). My birthday, to provide another example, is called “the day of emotional stimulation.” Now does this have something to do with Henry VIII, born on that date? All those wives? That’s pretty funny, especially given the advice they provide: “Work on your destructive side.”

Okay, I’m giving up on this book, which I should have done long ago. But just to throw a bone to Swedenborg, who wrote long dissertations about how the soul is separate from the body, here’s an update on Sam Parnia, who’s doing that experiment to see if people who have near death experiences can see things while they’re dead.

Gurdjieff and shampoo

We have a friend who was in a cult for several years. Cult leaders like to keep the delusional bubble intact, so they usually don’t let their members talk to the outside world; but from what I could tell, “The Work,” as it was called, was based on the Work of Gurdjieff.

For example: our friend had his watch set to go off at random intervals: Waking Up. He was also careful not to speak about himself as one unified whole. He’d name the various Selves as they came and went in the course of conversation: not Multiple Personality Disorder, but Self Remembering.

Our friend had a party for the guru and his followers, who were all showing off by pointing out everyone else’s Selves. Then the guru himself announced a giant Point-Out. Everyone sat down and listened raptly as he, the guru, took apart and criticized, one by one, all the Selves of my friend. This was the Work. I left the room.

My friend thanked the guru.

About a year later, after he had moved 300 miles to live in the guru’s compound, my friend had a heart attack, recovered, and left the group. He’s a pretty normal guy now, though he still spends a lot of time trying to figure out the meaning of life.

I write all this because it gave me great pleasure, yesterday, to write about Waking Up and a shampoo bottle in the same post.

Narcissistic self-involvement, Part 2

Gurdjieff, the Russian philosopher who believed he operated at a higher level than other people and taught his followers how to get there, had a technique he called “self-remembering.” You set an alarm to go off randomly, so that it “wakes you up” out of your familiar automatic state, and you observe yourself. This, supposedly, takes you from the deterministic to the self-determined world.

A friend and I once agreed to do this, but I went first, and my thoughts were amazingly boring. Perhaps as a result, she never reciprocated.

Now they’re studying this, as a recent article* in the Times tells us:

Psychologists have many ways to get inside our heads: they can give us questionnaires, track our eyes, time how long we take to respond to cues and measure the blood flow to our brains. But how close can these methods get to the texture of our inner lives?

According to the article, a psychologist named Russell Hurlburt took random samples of what a very agreeable subject was thinking by fitting her up with a beeper. When it went off, she recorded her thoughts – just like me. When Dr. Hurlburt studied himself, years later, he found out he doesn’t think in words or images, but in something he calls “unsymbolized thinking,” which is probably why he’s able to get his name in the New York Times.

All of this is a preamble, believe it or not. The other day I caught myself in a profound state of mind thinking about the bottle of shampoo I found in the shower at my gym, and about how to insert polls into blogs, and so here you go:

Results (if there are any) to follow later, maybe.

*I had a vague memory of linking to this article once before, and I found my post (which it turns out I wrote on Christmas) by searching for “ham sandwich.” This self-remembering can be so prosaic.