gwax's rumblings

One of the nice things about Woods Hole is that there are few enough lights that you can see the stars in the sky. It’s really quite pleas­ant to be out on a moon­less night and see so very many stars scat­tered across the skies.

Sometimes, being in San Francisco, I for­get how nice it is to go for an evening walk through empty, dark streets, with trees to the sides and stars above.

To get back to the tit­u­lar ques­tion, I’ve been see­ing quite a few shoot­ing stars–I think that I’m up to five since get­ting here–and I’ve always liked the tra­di­tion of wish­ing on shoot­ing stars. Being as I am, I don’t really put much merit in wish­ing, except inso­far as plant­ing things in one’s own sub­con­scious can be ben­e­fi­cial, but I also rather enjoy harm­less, mean­ing­less super­sti­tion from time to time. Of course, when things come down to super­sti­tion, eti­quette really takes on a strong role but eti­quettes of super­sti­tion tend to vary greatly. I find, that there are rel­a­tively few things that I would actu­ally want to wish for and that num­ber has already been over­come by the num­ber of shoot­ing stars that I have seen.

Is it poor form to reuse a wish on a new shoot­ing star?

I keep see­ing the same adver­tise­ment for the Palm Pre on the sides of buses; the adver­tise­ment says: “Life moves fast. Don’t miss a thing.”

I under­stand what they are try­ing to say and it is a very good tagline for what they are try­ing to mar­ket but, when­ever I see it, I can’t help but think that it speaks to a sad fact of our cur­rent culture.

I wish that I could say one thing to every­one that this tagline appeals to: Not every­thing mat­ters. Relax.

I real­ized, this morn­ing, that I objec­tify yeast. Sure I objec­tify meat, veg­eta­bles, trees and, heck, even some peo­ple but, even when I’m doing so, I don’t lose sight of the fact that these things are or were liv­ing beings. Yeast, how­ever, I treat a great deal more like a chem­i­cal or tiny machine. Yeast is some­thing that I add to wort to make beer; sure I need to tem­per­a­ture con­trol it and keep things clean but that’s the case with lots of wet chem­istry. If I didn’t know bet­ter, I might think of yeast as lit­tle more than a cat­a­lyst for con­vert­ing sugar to ethanol and car­bon diox­ide; there are nuances and yeast imparts other pro­cess­ing to the wort but those are minor details. Continued think­ing, com­bined with var­i­ous old thoughts of mine and some of my per­sonal philoso­phies led me to ques­tion the nature of life.

If I could replace yeast with a sin­gle chem­i­cal or mix­ture of a few chem­i­cals that were capa­ble of con­vert­ing wort to beer, would that mix­ture be alive? By most def­i­n­i­tions, prob­a­bly not, but what then makes yeast alive? Is it per­haps that yeast sep­a­rates its innards from the outer world? What if I made mem­brane bub­bles filled with wort-to-beer chem­i­cals that let reac­tants in and prod­ucts out, would that be alive? Perhaps it’s self-replication that makes yeast alive? What if I put nano-machines in the mem­brane bub­ble that were capa­ble of dupli­cat­ing them­selves and the chem­i­cals in the bub­ble as well as increas­ing the bub­ble size and split­ting it in half? Now we’ve prob­a­bly stepped well past the gray area and have either made some­thing that is either alive or nearly impos­si­ble to dis­tin­guish from some­thing alive.

What if we extend our self-replicating ethanol bub­ble notion? Would a self-replicating min­ing robot be alive? Are com­puter worms alive? Is a lathe that can be used to make more lathes like a virus in being almost alive, save for its need of host (lathe oper­a­tor)? If I write a piece of soft­ware that sim­u­lates yeast at an atomic level, is that piece of soft­ware alive?

Of course, already fol­low­ing pathetic and weakly emer­gent hylopathism, I’m of the opin­ion that every exam­ple I’ve given, from enzyme to yeast, from lathe to myself, is alive. My hylo­pathic view of alive­ness, how­ever, is quite at home coex­ist­ing with con­cep­tions of other people’s def­i­n­i­tions of alive­ness in my head. I find that allow­ing con­tra­dic­tory and, pos­si­bly, mutu­ally exclu­sive memes to live side by side in my head makes for some very inter­est­ing phi­los­o­phiz­ing and inter­nal dialogs.

I’m won­der­ing though, Internet, where do you draw your lines? What makes some­thing alive?

If we com­bine the tur­tles all the way down the­ory with a sim­u­lated real­ity the­ory, might we get a pro­gram­mers all the way up theory?

I have at many times in my life had brief, déjà vu like expe­ri­ences. A recent, par­tic­u­larly strong one inspired me to read up on the phe­nom­e­non a bit and men­tion the occur­rences. In read­ing through wikipedia, I came across the sub-categories of déjà vu and was struck by how much déjà senti, or ‘already felt,’ sounds like the phe­nom­e­non that I expe­ri­ence. The sen­sa­tion can be described as an uncanny sense of exactly repeat­ing a psy­cho­log­i­cal or emo­tional state, almost as if some­one had recorded my men­tal state at a time in the past and sud­denly loaded it back into my mind. When this hap­pens there is no inter­me­di­ary rem­i­nis­cence that reminds me of a pre­vi­ous state, just a sud­den shift to the old state. Usually, the phe­nom­e­non is very short lived with an equally abrupt shift back leav­ing me with a strong sense of, “woah, what just hap­pened in my mind?!” It’s a very curi­ous and rather pleas­ant expe­ri­ence, but I find myself won­der­ing if any­one else has had a sim­i­lar expe­ri­ence or has them recur­rently, as I do.

Sometimes I am able, after the fact, to recall an instance in which I was in the men­tal state that I shifted to and iden­tify a sim­i­lar­ity to the present, which may be a can­di­date trig­ger stim­u­lus. For exam­ple, the phe­nom­ena appear to have occurred in response to music on a quite a few occa­sions, where a par­tic­u­lar song jumps me into a state that I was in dur­ing a par­tic­u­lar pre­vi­ous time that I lis­tened to that song. These music induced jumps seem to occur more often with some songs than oth­ers but are, by no means, pre­dictable or repeat­able. If such a jump occurs with a given song, it is always to the same state for a given song, which can occa­sion­ally demand press­ing fast for­ward. The times when I am able to iden­tify the trig­ger and orig­i­nal recorded state are the minor­ity; some­times I get one or the other and some­times I get nei­ther. Regardless of how much I am able to con­sciously remem­ber, there is always a strong sense of rec­ol­lec­tion, hence déjà senti.

When I first started to become aware of these déjà senti occur­rences, I fig­ured them for some sort of synes­the­sia, fig­ur­ing that I had some sort of music→emotional cross. This the­ory gained some ground after a dis­cus­sion on the topic of synes­the­sia with my cousin, who has per­fect pitch; sound→color synes­the­sia and perfect-pitch are thought to have pos­si­ble con­nec­tions and genetic trends. However, as I started pay­ing more atten­tion, I came to real­ize that the phe­nom­ena are not iso­lated to audi­tory stim­u­lus and some­times seem to occur with­out any sen­sory stim­u­lus at all. Subsequently, I started con­sid­er­ing the phe­nom­e­non to be a form of déjà vu. Déjà vu being where I left my think­ing until the par­tic­u­larly strong and thor­oughly inex­plic­a­ble occur­rence that led to déjà senti and this post. It feels to me as though my brain may be doing a sim­i­lar thing in the case of déjà senti as in the case of leaps of intu­ition where I am able to feel the answer to a prob­lem long before I can rea­son through the prob­lem. Perhaps the brain is capa­ble of pro­cess­ing infor­ma­tion at a far faster rate than con­scious­ness can fol­low and some­times the brain doesn’t want to wait for con­scious­ness to catch up. Maybe I just need to start giv­ing my brain par­tial credit until it learns how to show its work. Of course, the impa­tient brain the­ory doesn’t explain why some of my end­points are com­plete psychological/emotional states.

As I have pro­gressed through my life I have become aware of var­i­ous pho­bias that exist in my psy­che. Most of my pho­bias are per­fectly rea­son­able and I’ve man­aged to trace some of them back to child­hood trau­mas that likely seeded them. However, some of my pho­bias are unrea­son­able and totally insane; for exam­ple, I have come to notice that I have a fairly strong fear of tem­po­ral dis­con­ti­nu­ities. What I mean by tem­po­ral dis­con­ti­nu­ities is unno­ticed jumps far for­ward in time, kind of like in the movie Flight of the Navigator. I don’t know where the fear derives from and it’s so thor­oughly implau­si­ble an occur­rence that giv­ing it even a hint of cre­dence is silly but it’s still some­thing that I fear.

Seriously though, I really hope that I never come back from a walk, drive or sail to find my friends and fam­ily had long since given me up for lost and that I must adjust to a world that has changed greatly dur­ing my lost time.

Earlier this evening I had the oppor­tu­nity to attend a house party hosted by one of my high school class­mates. As with most par­ties of the sort that I have ever attended, the real­ity was that I was mostly out of my ele­ment, though, if you ask me, I think that I did a pretty decent job of fak­ing it. Tonight, though, I made an inter­est­ing obser­va­tion about my own propen­si­ties as regards social inter­ac­tions in such a set­ting; I’d far pre­fer to have one inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion over any num­ber of less inter­est­ing ones. I hap­pened to find myself in a con­ver­sa­tion with another one of my high school class­mates at this party who was in a fairly technically/scientifically advanced field. The con­ver­sa­tion began, as many of the evening did, with my half-interestedly ask­ing what she was up to now and her respond­ing and gen­eral cor­dial­ity and what­not. The con­ver­sa­tion con­tin­ued a lit­tle and I found myself gen­uinely inter­ested in what it was that she was up to but the con­ver­sa­tion never really got too far past the generic. I tried, barely really, to steer the con­ver­sa­tion in a direc­tion such that it might involve inter­est­ing tech­ni­cal details but she was hav­ing none of it.

I ask you, Internet, is it unrea­son­able for me to want to have a sci­en­tific con­ver­sa­tion at a house party? Is it weird for me to want to know what some­one is studying/researching to a real extent? Am I a huge nerd?

I attended a few par­ties thrown by some MIT-folk this week­end and I’ve come to two con­clu­sions; I now under­stand din­ner par­ties and I’m get­ting old. At 3:30a Sunday, when I left a house-warming party, of sorts, that began around 10p Saturday, I found myself think­ing that I’d had rather a good time but it would have been nice if it started closer to 7p or 8p and I’d left closer to 11p or 12a so as to let me get to sleep ear­lier. Get to sleep ear­lier?! I’ve always prided myself on my noc­tur­nal nature and my desire to stay up late social­iz­ing and here I am want­ing to go to sleep ear­lier! Now, the obvi­ous rea­son for this is that I’m chron­i­cally under-sleeping these days and hav­ing to reg­u­larly wake up early. Of course, I don’t like obvi­ous rea­sons, so instead I’ll go with hav­ing been in sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tions before and not wanted to go to sleep ear­lier so I can only assume that I’m, in some ways, grow­ing up, which, inci­den­tally, is lamer than Thor’s goat. I did man­age to get past the non-functional leg aspects of things and think about par­ties from a more prac­ti­cal stand­point, in which it occured to me that it would have been quite nice if such a party started around 5p or 6p involved cock­tails, a meal and more cock­tails; wait, that sounds an awful lot like a din­ner party now doesn’t it.

The obvi­ous thing that I, or you for that mat­ter, can take from this is that some­day in my (or your) life, din­ner and cock­tail par­ties should be run in the vein of col­lege par­ties. Of course, I must add a caveat here; namely, if you like those despi­ca­ble binge drink-a-thons where they serve end­less sup­plies of ter­ri­ble beer and plas­tic bot­tle liquor, don’t run cock­tail par­ties like your col­lege par­ties. Actually, I guess what I’m really say­ing is that the par­ties I’ve attended recently remind me more of the idea of a cock­tail party than of a stereo­typ­i­cal col­lege party and I think that’s a good thing.