streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 10:10 am on May 17, 2015 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: philosophy, POETRY ( 12 ), politics ( 32 ), religion ( 161 ), social commentary   

  Religio-politics 101: Desiderata Considerata 

  

  Texas, Mexico, river, fence and questions

  …and a strange peace comes over me, in the midst of all the chaos, rejection and reflection, in the midst of patchwork solutions to comprehensive problems that are beyond my comprehension… and I think it has to do with people, last but not least of the great apes, violent and intelligent beyond belief, the gentle ones naturally long gone, left only with the hardened ones that must be softened by religion often rendered impossible by the needle tracks of time and the sloppy sutras of space…

  We are pathetic little people with our pathetic little problems of food, shelter and clothing, mostly just demanding dignity, Capital D Dignity, as if that were the most important thing in the world, that self-importance, that self-esteem, that love that is a priori to all other loves, that feeling of being centered in our self slightly above the navel and just below the head let’s call it heart and get it over with, the connections between people one of heart firstly and foremostly…

  I love the so-called losers of this world because they are the humans with heart, sometimes, or sometimes not, but at least they’re usually open to it, for lack of better options, but it’s not that I hate those who are so sure of themselves and such masters of the world; it’s that I pity them for they will never know the feeling of submission, the feeling of being part of an indivisible whole of which they count only for a little bit, whether entertainers CEO’s or politicians, it’s lonely up there…

  Celebrity sickness is the disease of the day in late 21^st C. America, drunk on fame, real or imagined, our obligatory fifteen minutes barely enough in this day and age of hard drugs and random hugs, gotta’ keep the rush coming to see ourselves in pictures on the Big Screen; selfies won’t do for much more than government work, the basic minimum of likes, follows and shares needed to gain some face and hold on to it for a day or two. Why do we see ourselves on the Big Screen at the expense of ourselves on the ground planting seeds and forgiving misdeeds?

  My main memory of a visit to Cuba was the loaded question from a local functionary, fully formed and well-thought-out, could only come from a Commie, stuck behind ironic curtains for most of his life and that of a nation: “Just what do you need Internet for, anyway?”

  (space intentionally left blank)

  Just what DO we need most, anyway? Why are we obsessed with this corporate mentality of skyscrapers Hondas and iPhones while homeless people are sleeping on the streets and begging for food? Is there no middle ground that we can all be part of? Maybe it’s time to reassess our priorities. Maybe it’s time to get back to the garden—a high-tech one—we and our smart-phones: but no two-year contracts, please…

   

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  hardie karges 11:36 am on November 16, 2014 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Einstein ( 11 ), JESUS ( 21 ), philosophy, Plato ( 17 ), Science ( 25 )   

  THEORIES OF EVUH’ THANG (I f***ing love philosophy) 

  

  Yes, I sometimes poke fun at those wannabe scientists who claim to ‘f*cking love’ it, but who usually know little or nothing about it, just enough to act superior to die-hard Biblical Creationists, easy enough for sure, but who usually settle for an ad hoc poorly-thought-out scantily-clad pseudo-sci-fi proudly-proclaimed atheism-cum-religion, accent on the cum, that frequently involves tweaking the meds just right, usually strong enough to strip the polish off my spit-shined hiking boots, caffeine my drug of choice, just sayin’…

  It’s not that I don’t love science; I do. I just never knew what it had to do with my sex drive, or lack thereof. Wait a minute; oh, right. Anyway it’s nice to have two movies featuring Big Science up on the movie screens at the same time, which gives us four physicists, instead of the usual two, in the public spotlight, Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne added to the usual one-two punch of Michio Kaku and Neil deGrasse Tyson, (and then there’s that guy with the big smile, from San Francisco, I think).  Bizniz is good, I guess.

  There was a time when philosophy and physics were the same activity—thinking, observing, analyzing, deducing—but that’s been a while, sometime after Descartes and before Wittgenstein, I guess, Russell and Whitehead being something of a last gasp at reconciling at least the math (abstract) side of science with the logical (concrete) side of philosophy. They are much the same thing, after all, notwithstanding Hawking’s diss of philosophers’ math skills; guess he never read Leibniz.

  But when science loses its connection to common language, it just may be getting off on an irresponsible tangent. Or maybe I’m being pessimistic. I mean, it would be nice if Science could save us and the planet, as suggested in ‘Interstellar’, but if that depends on ‘worm-holes’, then I’d maybe prefer some more Green Science here on Earth, instead. Theoretical physics is nice, but just that—theoretical; and as often as not, a mathematical convenience, best explained by the dictum, “it works.” End of story…NOT.  Wormhole that.

  Quantum mechanics is so foreign to common sense that relativity is considered ‘classical’. It works, but we have little possibility of imagining it. Relativity can be visualized; Einstein did. Curved space? No problem. But faster-than-light tachyons that can only slow down to light speed…maybe? Meh—better keep that day job, just in case. But Einstein’s failure to embrace quantum mechanics, partly his creation, may still suggest some problems with the theory, not just with Einstein, the old fuddy-duddy.

  One of Einstein’s lesser-heralded (but most accepted) ideas (can’t remember the name) was that the laws of physics operate the same any time all the time anywhere everywhere in the universe. Sounds simple, and I don’t think it’s ever really been questioned, but what if it’s not true? What if we’re in a little isolated pocket of the universe (or consciousness) where things do not operate normally? And no, we don’t need God for this, though any and all help is welcome, haha.

  Let’s say for example that our world is something of a ‘construction zone, observe posted speeds (double fines in effect), etc.’ In other words, what if the observable universe has flows and eddies (or IS such; and no, not the classic rock duo), ‘slow lanes’ so to speak, in which things happen at less than the speed of light, which would seem to be the norm for this dimension, or at least the next (observable) one, and which might define spirituality as well as light and electricity. That just might give you frequencies that you can touch. Sound familiar?

  It sounds feasible, doesn’t it, that Nature—and Reality—might operate at differing levels of efficiency? If we know that, then we can account for it as an anomaly… unless we’re in the middle of the anomaly. Then everything else seems weird and unexplainable, e.g. the universe expands at ever increasing speeds. The Big Bang. Gravity. Physicality. Stuff. Weird. Welcome to the slow cool world. Such is life—in time, and space…

  But what if reality is essentially spiritual, composed of waves that act like particles (hehe) and particles that act like waves (oops), a transcendental stew of light and electricity—and us—all swirling and whirling and hitting the road at the speed of light, we know not where? Now I’m no scientist by trade, but I’m betting that if spirituality is the answer you want, then the questions you ask become simpler. Or not. Just a thought. Welcome to my lumpy gravy theory of the universe. I’m hungry.

  (Einstein, Jesus and Plato are probably my favorite thinkers of all time, BTW, one’s thought experiments, the other’s parables and the latter’s dialogs equivalent in my mind to the finest things that a human mind is capable of–smartphone optional)
   
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  hardie karges 11:27 am on November 2, 2014 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Buddhism ( 437 ), philosophy, possession ( 5 ), religion ( 161 )   

  Buddhism 101: ‘Letting Go’, and all that jazz 

  

  One of the Buddha quotes currently making frequent rounds on Facebook these days goes something like (I’m paraphrasing, since my Pali is a little rusty anyway): ‘…the important thing in life…is how well you let go’…

  Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that that quote is accurate and correct, if not entirely complete nor definitive. Now that’s interesting, because I’d always credited Buddhism (from Hindu precedents) as advocating ‘non-possession’. But ‘letting go’ is not ‘non-possession.’ ‘Letting go’ implies that there was previous possession, and that’s an important point. I think I was wrong all these years. (More …)

   
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  hardie karges 7:22 pm on October 26, 2014 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: consciousness ( 29 ), philosophy, religion ( 161 ), thought ( 15 )   

  Religion 101: the Quest for Meaning 

  

  Hindu God

  In the Beginning was the Question: WTF? And thus was born Consciousness, self-consciousness, both blessing and curse. Could the origins of consciousness be of anything besides the juxtaposition of Self and Other? I doubt it. From that is born the recognition of basic relationships, very similar to Boolean logic: more than, less than, equal to, etc. This is primal thought, thought without language. From that all the plethora and panoply of consciousness is possible.

  Now that we have language, it’s hard to imagine thinking without it, because we certainly do think in a language, just as does a computer. But computers existed, and had functions, before language, and so did we humanoids: not much, perhaps, but some, enough to populate several continents, apparently for no other reason than that they were there, and had food.

  From the basic relationships come causal relationships: if this, then that, every time, so one must be the cause of the other. Animals do this all the time, and without language, as we know it. Yet they exist—and have meaning, to us, at least. This cause-effect relationship I suspect is the origin of ‘reason’, in fact, and arises very early in the history of thought, in fact the same word in some languages. (More …)

   
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  hardie karges 6:59 am on October 3, 2014 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: EVOLUTION ( 20 ), Hardie Karges ( 248 ), philosophy, POETRY ( 12 ), society ( 5 )   

  Evolution for Dummies: Junk DNAAND the Double Helix of Culture 

  

  crown of thorns

  If evolution really favors smaller more adaptable units—which it apparently does—then Americans are in trouble, we with our much-heralded ‘ownership society’, especially cars and houses, the bigger the better. America is overweight, but it ain’t just carbs and fat. It’s fuel injection and renovated flats, these possessions that possess us, these conveniences that encumber us, these adornments that weigh us down, down to the ground, six feet under, rest in peace…

  Dinosaurs went extinct and so likely will we, as Americans of the central model paradigm, at least, hocked to the gills with credits and debits and accounting tricks and treats, and plenty of reasons to retreat; why bother with success, anyway, when there are so many reasons for failure? How did you want to go down in the Apocalypse, btw: was it war, famine, disease, or flame? It’s no wonder; it’s nobody’s shame, just butterfly effects gone wild with mathematical precision…

  Self-sufficiency used to be considered a positive personality trait, hard work a must. Saving was encouraged, if not absolutely required, and in God we trust; all others pay cash. Now we’re a nation of leveraged, selfied-out crybabies waiting in line camped out all night for our iPhones and soma, got a ticket for N’awlins but the bus stops at Houma, all cashed out and nothing left to buy, can’t buy a thrill, all we can do is cry…

  Even unemployed Americans have iPhones, of course, money no object, that’s a fact, that’s currency; homeless people, too, now, taking donations online, gotta’ check on the status of food stamps, see if that Social Security check is in the mail. Half the world lives on less than three dollars a day; see how many iPhones that’ll buy you, true poverty struggling to eat very day, not Yelp or snap-chat, giga-chips and cookies with no trans fat…

  But rich people are worse, crunching their numbers between gold fillings, fracking veins and splicing genes, GMO cereal killers with their high-flying lifestyles on private jets and multiple planes, properties portfolios and multidimensional probabilities, many worlds possible, taking off and landing with the frequency of junk, buying and selling people like so much chattel and so many cattle, bodies for sale, ten bills a pop, credit cards accepted, swipe it where you wipe it…

  The Anthropocene Age has been a blast, a quick short spurt of consciousness and destruction after years of ignorance and bliss, man inserting his thingie into multiple orifices, simultaneously, plugging holes and creating new ones, just for the Hell of it, just because it’s there, Mt. Everest and the Moon, by horoscope and all good offices, all for the good of mankind, come Hell or high water, reduced to comfort food and memories, that’s entertainment…

   
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  hardie karges 3:05 pm on June 23, 2014 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: nature ( 17 ), nurture, philosophy, sex ( 39 )   

  #Nature vs. #Nurture and the great Human Crap Shoot 

  Nature vs. Nurture is one of the great debates of history and science, at least since the origin of the science of genetics, i.e. whether human lives are more the product of genetics or experience. This is closely related to the previous philosophical debate of free will vs. determinism. The subject is literally something of a ‘chicken vs. egg’ question, though, largely unanswerable and ultimately futile, that egg and that coop both necessary and more or less equal. So let’s call it a draw.

  It turns out we have far fewer genes—a mere few tens of thousands—than would account for the variety of human and biological experience, and many of those only come into play when ‘turned on,’ oh baby. If the hand you’re dealt cannot really be changed (would you even want to? That’s YOU), then the hand you play is (almost) infinitely open-ended, so fair enough. If you’re lucky you may even get to throw a few cards away and request some new ones. Bottom line: get off your ass and create your life.

  (More …)