More or Less Real

Physicists describe the universe, or attempt to, using systems of equations. In order to create accurate descriptions, the equations make use of certain numerical constants — things like the speed of light and the strength of gravity.

What’s odd about these constants is that they seem almost have been fine-tuned so as to allow living beings such as ourselves to exist. If the force of gravity were just slightly smaller, for instance, stars and galaxies would never have formed. The entire universe would consist of a rapidly expanding cloud of gas. On the other hand, if gravity were just a little stronger, the stars and galaxies we see would all have collapsed into black holes. No planets, no sunlight, and perforce no scientists to look through telescopes and think about these things.

For those who believe in God, such a state of affairs is not difficult to explain. God created it that way, so that folks like us could come into being. Appeals to divine intervention are not, however, given much credence by scientists. Yet on the other side of the coin, it seems an awfully big coincidence that our universe should happen to have the characteristics that it is observed to have.

We do know that the universe we observe seems to have had a beginning, or something very like a beginning. About 13.8 billion years ago, our universe was extremely hot, extremely dense, and no bigger than the head of a pin. Since then, it has been expanding rapidly. Our most sophisticated

Top Dogs

After being away from the computer for a couple of days, I return to a big dose of crazy-making news clips, all at once. (And I haven’t even glanced at the bulletins from CPAC. I’m scared to.) As upsetting as these bits are, seeing them all in a compressed space of time makes it easier to notice the common thread that runs through all of the stories.

Rachel Maddow has new details on the Sandy Hook shootings, and lets us watch the freshman senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, try to lecture Diane Feinstein on the Second Amendment. Since Feinstein became mayor of San Francisco in 1978 following the assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, it’s pretty clear Cruz picked the wrong antagonist, but apparently nothing is going to stop him. He thinks it’s just peachy for us all to own high-capacity automatic rifles.

Saving the lives of children doesn’t interest him. Unless, I suppose, they haven’t yet been born. Once they’ve been born, just mow them down. Ted will give you a medal.

On the other side of the aisle, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York grills some generals about the entire failure of the military justice system to deal with rape. She tries to get the generals to say that justice hasn’t been served, and they duck and weave and tap dance to avoid admitting it.

Over in North Africa, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is forthrightly opposing a U.N. resolution that attempts (toothlessly) to prevent violence against women. Apparently these guys don’t even give a moment’s thought to how vicious

The Sorting Mittens

Many years ago, when I was editing Chick Corea’s column for Keyboard, he suggested to me that I really ought to read Dianetics, by L. Ron Hubbard. I wish I still had the note Chick sent; at some point along the way, I must have tossed it.

I did in fact pick up a copy of Dianetics at Chick’s suggestion. I read about 20 pages. All I remember about it, after more than 30 years, is that Hubbard started out by redefining some ordinary words to mean entirely new things. Or possibly he just started using the words in new ways without bothering to define them. Technically speaking, it was gobbledygook. Its main appeal, it seems to me, would be to people who are desperately seeking answers to life’s deeper questions but lack the critical thinking skills that would let them sort out which are the good answers and which are the nonsensical ones. Assuming there are any good answers, which I think is very questionable.

Call me a seeker. Today I’m reading Journey into Consciousness, by Charles Breaux. It purports to reveal connections between Tantra and Jungian psychology. At first glance, it seems more sensible than some books on such subjects. That’s why I brought it home from the library. But as I dig deeper, it begins to remind me of Dianetics. Not in its details, mind you, but in the fact that you’re expected to take as factual a bunch of stuff that is neither defined nor adequately explained.

According to Gautama Buddha, Breaux tells us, “All life is in flux, and trying to establish something solid and permanent leads to suffering. Feeling attached to

Bad Data

My friend Marco steered me to a critique of Dean Radin’s book The Conscious Universe, and I have to admit that the critique (though at times very silly) scored a few direct hits. Not having a degree in statistical analysis and not, moreover, having access to any of the original data Radin cites, I’m in no position to say yea or nay with respect to whether telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition exist. Radin seems to make a strong case, but the accusation he levels at skeptics — that they’re only seeing what they want to see — applies equally to him.

The statistical data is provocative, first because there seems to be quite a lot of it and second because none of it is very persuasive. That is, if telepathy is real, it seems odd that it would be so difficult to demonstrate in a clear way. The statistics pile up, but even if they mean what Radin thinks they mean, they all show a very slight effect.

This may be because the scientists are designing their studies badly. The telepathy experiments Radin describes uniformly use senders and receivers who have no special bonds to one another, and the data they’re supposed to send and receive is of no special emotional significance. If telepathy exists, those are not the conditions under which we would expect it to show up! Quite the contrary. Indeed, most of the anecdotal material about supposed telepathic communication, which of course we can’t duplicate in the laboratory because it’s anecdotal, concerns

Pressing Concerns

The accusation could fairly be leveled at me that I don’t much care how I look. My socks usually match, and I do comb my hair, but nobody is ever going to mistake me for a fashionista. (On one recent occasion I discovered that I had arrived at the gym wearing mismatched tennis shoes, but that was strictly an anomaly.)

Nonetheless, I do iron my shirts. Or rather, I try to.

I own an implement that is reputed to be a steam iron. It was made by Black & Decker, who are better known for their table saws. That may be part of the problem. What it actually is is not a steam iron. It’s a steam-plus-intermittent-gouts-of-hot-water iron. Or, for short, a steam-and-peepee iron. In between bursts of steam, it dribbles (and occasionally spurts) puddles of hot water onto whatever garment I’m attempting to flatten.

After ironing my shirts, I have to hang them up to dry. Once in a while I have to wring them out and iron them again.

But that’s not the worst of it. I’m sincerely baffled that no one has invented an ironing board the same shape as a shirt. Getting a shirt to lie flat on the ironing board while ironing it requires three hands — one to wield the iron and two more to keep the shirt from scrunching up, sliding off onto the floor, or both at once.

Possibly the fact that my shirts were sewn in factories in China, India, and the Philippines by low-paid women who harbor quite justifiable grudges against American white men has something to do with it. The shirts usually bunch at the seams. They also bunch in places where there are no seams. I suspect voodoo.

I haven’t given up yet. I even iron the collars. But if you see me wandering around town someday in my pajamas, you’ll know why.

On the Fringe

Discussions of telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition tend to be dismissed as so much New Age crystal-gazing. As it turns out, though, the scientific evidence for these phenomena is overwhelming. The only people who doubt that such things really happen either are ignorant (probably because they’ve been misled by self-appointed debunkers) or have a strong vested interest in a hard-headed “scientific” world view that not even physicists believe in any more.

This week I’ve been reading a couple of very interesting books – The Conscious Universe by Dean Radin and Morphic Resonance by Rupert Sheldrake. I recommend them both. Together, they unveil some very provocative possibilities.

Radin provides an overview of decades of meticulous experiments designed to verify (or disprove) the idea that telepathy, precognition, and similar phenomena are real. Be prepared for a crash course in statistics — this is not a book of impossible-to-reproduce anecdotes about Aunt Greta’s dream that her dog had died. There are graphs.

What Radin doesn’t do is provide a theory that might have the power to explain the phenomena. He dips his toe in quantum physics to the extent of talking about non-locality (which is an interesting and highly suggestive topic), and also examines the psychology of skeptics in considerable detail, but he pretty much leaves it up to you to draw your own conclusions.

Sheldrake has a theory. His book is mainly concerned with biological phenomena such as embryo development and instinctive behavior; telepathy isn’t even listed in his book’s index. Nonetheless, his theory of morphic resonance provides

The March of the Mundane

Remember bookstores? Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s I used to browse in small indie bookstores and pick up quirky but provocative books, some of which are still on my shelves. Yesterday, moved by an obscure impulse, I pulled out Inner Visions, a 1979 paperback by Nevill Drury. I’m pretty sure I bought it because of the chapter on the Tarot.

I don’t remember a word of what’s in the book, and it’s not clear I’m going to sit down and read it this month. What prompted me to mention it was the misguided optimism in the Introduction. When Drury was writing this book, the term “counter-culture” could still be used, and with a straight face. Experiments with psychedelic drugs were taken seriously by intelligent people. In the Introduction, he mentions the album covers of Roger Dean, notes “the relationship of the fantasy art on record sleeves to the electronic inner-space music which it often represents,” and suggests that “these forms of modern music represent one facet of the contemporary reaction against scientism and the search for what [Theodore] Roszak has termed the visionary sources of our culture.”

The question I’m asking myself is, what happened? How did a cultural movement that seemed to promise a change for the better get so thoroughly derailed? Why, today, do we roll our eyes and cringe with embarrassment when we encounter Drury’s enthusiasm for magical consciousness and “a truly open-ended cosmology”?

What happened, for starters, was

Who Gets to Say What’s Right?

Today I got into one of those annoying and unproductive discussions on Facebook — a disagreement with a complete stranger. It started with the question of whether a Christian florist (by which I mean, a Christian florist of the bigoted asshole variety) should have the right to refuse to provide flowers for a gay wedding, or whether the florist should be required not to discriminate as a condition of doing business.

As nearly as I can determine, my antagonist in this little debate was (a) in favor of equal treatment for homosexuals, (b) opposed to government sanctions of almost any kind. He raised the specter of California’s Proposition 8, and asked whether I support the right of the people of California to legally deny marriage rights to gay couples. To him, this is an example of the government mandating a moral principle, something he feels shouldn’t be allowed.

But this is not as easy a question as it seems. In each case — enforcing gay rights or forbidding them — the government is essentially stepping in and making moral decisions that are then binding upon individuals, so I can certainly see that there need to be limits on what the government can or should do. After mulling it over, I think a productive way to approach such questions may be to make a distinction between public morality and private morality.

A Christian of the bigoted asshole variety certainly has a right to cross the street in order to avoid coming into proximity with a gay couple that is holding hands, or to refuse to rent a room to them in his home. The right to avoid gay people is a private right. Likewise, a church is

Who Stole My Planet?

Not infrequently, I have the feeling that when I wasn’t looking, somebody took away the planet I was supposed to be living on and substituted a really sad satirical parody.

Tonight I thought I’d poke around and see what’s happening in electronic music in the SF Bay Area, which is where I happen to live. There’s plenty of dance music suitable for partying, which interests me not even a little tiny bit. There’s also a fair amount of avant-garde bullshit. I’ve given up trying to dial up a friendly euphemism; I’m going to stick with “bullshit.” This is the kind of music where nobody knows what’s going to happen next, least of all the performers; where painstaking rehearsal and proficiency on one’s instrument are anathema; where communicating a sense of beauty, symmetry, or emotional drama with an informed audience would be considered selling out.

I’m off in an odd corner of the music universe, you see: I happen to use synthesizers and software, along with drum sounds, bass lines, funky syncopations, tightly crafted melodies, unusual time signatures, and exotic microtonal tunings; yet my aesthetic is informed principally by Bach, Haydn, and Brahms. Plus maybe a little Scott Joplin. Whatever planet my people are hanging out on, it isn’t this one.

While looking around, I stumbled on this description of a recent concert at the Lab in San Francisco, which fortunately I missed. I quote:

“In a two-part concert, cellist Charles Curtis will present solo works created for and with him by Éliane Radigue, Alvin Lucier and Alison Knowles. Radigue’sNaldjorlak (2005) is a nearly hour-long, continuous exploration of the acoustical properties of the cello, centered around a tuning of the cello to its own intrinsic resonance. All of the strings are brought into alignment with the cello’s ‘wolf tone’; the entire corpus of the cello is engaged to elicit a complex, closely related spectrum of harmonics and resonances. Lucier’s Slices for Cello and Pre-recorded Orchestra (2011) sets the solo cello against a sustained chromatic tone cluster in 52 orchestral instruments, arrayed as a Supercollider patch. By outlining the cluster in various melodic orderings, the solo cello erases and re-inscribes the orchestral cluster in a slowly unfolding process. Alison Knowles’ Rice and Beans for Charles Curtis (2008) is a graphic score made of hand made rice paper, beans, lentils and bits of fabric and string. Curtis interprets this work of visual art in a performance analogous to the making of the score, working over the ‘score’ of the instrument in several passes, seeking out unsuspected resonances by tapping, rubbing and stroking the instrument with bare hands.”

Non-cellists may not know what the wolf tone is. It’s the natural vibratory resonance of the body of the instrument, and it’s an annoyance. It’s something you have to manage, something that you try to avoid. Since the wolf is usually near the F below Middle C, it’s a bit difficult to guess how all four strings could be “brought into alignment” with it. If you try to tune the low C string up a 4th, to the F an octave below the wolf, you’re going to break the string. Ditto for bringing the D string up a minor 3rd to the wolf — but if you tune the D string down a major 6th so it’s an octave below the wolf, it’s going to flop around like a loose piece of rope. Also, to be honest, if what you’re seeking is “a complex, closely related spectrum of harmonics and resonances,” the cello is not your best choice for a sound production device. Personally, I’d recommend a good computer. But what do I know? I only play both the cello and the computer.

What we have here, in short, is a concert in which listeners were treated to ugly resonances for an hour (bound to be boring), a sustained and slowly unfolding chromatic tone cluster (bound to be boring), and a graphic score made of lentils, which is performed not by bowing the cello but by hitting it (boring, unintentionally humorous, and insulting to the listener, all at the same time).

You may say, “But Jim, you didn’t hear the concert! It may have been grand!” Well, no, I take it back. I’m sure you’re not stupid enough to say that.

Apparently, Curtis teaches at UC San Diego. God help his students.

Nuts & Bolts

Wandered into the library this afternoon, spotted a book on the New Arrivals table — Rupert Sheldrake’s Science Set Free. His brief is to question the orthodox scientific world view, a project that his Ph.D. from Cambridge in plant biology gives him the credentials to undertake.

My feelings about Chapter One, “Is Nature Mechanical,” were quite negative. It seemed to me that Sheldrake is hopping over too many fences in this material, or failing to connect the dots if you prefer a different metaphor. After jumping forward to Chapter Nine, however (“Are Psychic Phenomena Illusory?”), I revised my opinion of Sheldrake rather sharply upward. I went back to Chapter One and started reading it again with a different mindset.

If you don’t feel a need to rush out and buy the book, you can hear most of the material in Chapter Nine in an hour-long YouTube video.

In Chapter One, Sheldrake reconsiders the standard scientific notion that the universe operates according to blind mechanical laws.

There are reasons to question this notion. The idea that the universe is mechanical arose only in the 17th century, when mechanical clocks became common. We can see the same kind of analogizing at work today, when the mind or brain is compared to a computer. A hundred years ago, it was often compared to a telephone exchange, in which imaginary operators plugged and unplugged cables. Whatever is new and wondrous — well, the universe must be just like that. People seem to need these metaphors in order to reduce complexities to manageable dimensions, but inevitably the metaphors warp our thinking and leave some observations unexplained (or denied).

Sheldrake mentions quantum uncertainty, which does indeed undercut the old-fashioned Newtonian idea that if one knew the precise position and momentum of every particle in the universe at a given point in time, and had a powerful enough computer, one could infallibly predict the course of all future events. Quantum uncertainty flushes that idea down the crapper. But the leap from quantum uncertainty to the idea that