Godsong of the Pale Blue Women, 25th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Often, while I'm in my alternating-day meditation, I'll have a stream of thought that I'll want to post here in this blog. But after I'm done and sit down in front of the computer, I find that either the thought was way more involved and convoluted than I could possibly try to capture in a single blog post, or that I can capture portions of it but can't find a starting point to jump in on, or, most often, that I can't remember the "genius" idea I wanted to write down. The memory is like a dream, vivid at first, half gone by the morning's first cup of coffee, and completely forgotten by noon. 

Leave it to Michael Pollan to describe the ephemeral nature of thought far better than I can ever hope.  Our so-called thoughts, he writes in A World Arises, "are preverbal, often showing up as images, sensations, or concepts, with words trailing behind as a kind of afterthought - belated attempts to translate hose elusive wisps of meaning into something more substantial and shareable." 

Exactly. We understand and know what we're thinking without needing the words to nail it down. I might forget a person's name or a movie title, but I know full well who or what I'm thinking of and don't need a label in my mind to identify them. A smile, a nod, and a simple "thank you" might have made my day, and I recall the sensation without having to tell myself it was, say, Joan White from accounting, and when I tell someone else how much I appreciated the gesture, I find that the name "Joan" is suddenly gone because I didn't need the proper noun for it to exist in my memory. 

Also, while I might use full sentences to reconstruct a thought ("last night, I was thinking about a sunset I once saw in Lanzarote"), when I was actually remembering that sunset last night, my mind didn't form the words "a sunset I once saw in Lanzarote." In my mind, I just imagined the reddish sky over the ocean blue, and felt the fading warmth of the crepuscule sun. Our memories, the stories we tell to ourselves, depend on words, but the faculty of memory, the way they actually arise in our minds, doesn't need language - we already know what we're thinking.  

In Ulysses, James Joyce accurately mimicked the mind's stream-of-consciousness wording, but it's difficult and sometimes annoying to read the words. "Hmm, mustn't," Leopold Bloom thinks to himself. "On the dresser, the letter. Breakfast, eggs. Nearly time." If he were trying to tell someone else what he was thinking right then, he'd say he was trying to not think about what his wife was doing back at home at that very moment, because he saw the letter from her lover on the dresser thar morning saying they would be trysting within the hour. But all those words aren't how thoughts arise, and "Hmm, mustn't. On the dresser, the letter. Breakfast, eggs. Nearly time," is much closer, and that's how Joyce writes it in Ulysses (actually, something like that - with apologies to Mr. Joyce, I'm too lazy to go look that passage up to get the exact wording, but you get the idea).

I'm driving to Knoxville today and don't have the time to post much else here today. I may not return to posting until The Topaz Glove, the 29th Day of Spring (March 30 to y'all), but I may post some late-night or early-morning updates about the Big Ears sets over at Music Dissolves Water and on Instagram, if you know how to find me there.   

Car. Long trip. No time. Music first.

 

The Ant Garden, 24th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): One thing old Angus MacLise would never have anticipated was the four-day Big Ears music festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. I firmly believe MacLise would have appreciated and enjoyed it, and participated in it with his friends Lou Reed and John Cale and La Mont Young (who had a composition premiere here a couple years ago), but MacLise passed away some 30 years before the festival even began.  

But in an imaginary, alternative time line, one wonders if MacLise would have been tempted to add four days of Big Ears to his Universal Solar Calendar (i.e., Day of Big Ears, Second Day of Big Ears, etc.). I've been tempted to add it to my New Revised USC, but the dates aren't the same every year (it's generally the last full weekend in March), and the whole purpose of the New Revision is for annual repeatability and regularity. Can't have a name day that's the 25th of Spring one year and the 23rd another year.     

All of which is probably the most awkward and nerdiest way possible to say the Big Ears music festival starts tomorrow, and I'll be going. There's no single bucket-list, must-see performer appearing this year. However, I'm looking forward to hearing some of John Zorn's sets in his third residency here in the past four years, including the first reunion of his original Masada quartet (1994-97), as well as guitarists Fred Frith, Jeff Parker, Nels Cline, Marc Ribot, and Mary Halvorson, all of whom I've seen at least once or more before at previous Big Ears since 2018. Vibraphonist Patricia Brennan will be presenting her outstanding septet and drummer Ches Smith will be performing with his new Clone Row band. Even drummer Dave Lombardo of the band Slayer will be there for a set with Zorn and keyboardist John Medeski. A first (for me, as well as many others, I suspect) will be the legendary but elusive downtown musician and artist Charlemagne Palestine, a contemporary of La Mont Young who probably knew MacLise. 

Pat Metheny is making his Big Ears debut this year and I haven't seen him since 1987, but I'll miss his 2½-hour set tomorrow night due to conflicts with other performances at or about the same time. Ditto Laurie Anderson, who I saw at Big Ears 2024 and who returns this year for several performances, including a duet with Zorn. But again, conflicts and schedule issues. 

The ghost of Lou Reed hangs over this year's festival. Not only is his widow, Laurie Anderson, performing, as is his pre-Velvets contemporary Charlemagne Palestine, but there will be an installation piece on Sunday at an old Greyhound station of Reed's guitars leaning against amplifiers to create a continuous feedback drone, accompanied by various, as-yet unannounced musicians selected by Anderson. 

The festival is like an ocean - so big you can't even drink half of it in. At any given moment, there may be as more than a dozen performances on separate stages, and one can only be at one place at a time. That can get frustrating, especially if you have FOMO, and the Zen approach is to just enjoy the set you're experiencing at any given moment and not think about all that you're missing. 

The way I look at it is Big Ears in a major event, an international gathering of an astonishing number of world-class musicians, all performing, collaborating, and improvising together in the unlikely location of Knoxville, Tennessee, a mere four-hour drive away. The event is not about me, or any other single listener, but we get to be some small part of the titanic happening. 

And for that we should be grateful.

 

Fifth Ocean, 23rd Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): Fifth ocean of the year, second of this spring. 

It's now almost comically apparent that the Stable Genius had no strategic plan for the war in Iran, and had fully expected Tehran to surrender after the first day of bombing. 

You can't blame him, though. He's used to dealing with the Democrats.  

Fifth Day of the Zenith, 22nd of Spring, 526 M.E. (Electra):  Oh, fun! There's yet another new climate-change study out! Always a big day in the WDW household! 

This one, State of the Global Climate, 2025, was prepared by the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, and documents  the rapid, large-scale changes to Earth's climate, and their impacts on human health and natural systems, including contributions to food insecurity, and displacement of people, i.e., the mass migration of climate refugees. 

Let's start with the basics. The temperature of the Earth changes in response to the rate at which energy enters and leaves the planetary system. That's a common-sense, and hopefully non-controversial, observation - if more energy enters the system than leaves, the planet warms up; if more energy leaves than enters, the planet cools off. 

Greenhouse gases reduce the rate at which energy leaves the system. That's a basic physio-chemical fact, not an opinion or some far-fetched theory, but its inconvenient truth has lead some to try and cast doubt on that. Think of an actual greenhouse - the glass panes let in warming solar energy, but trap the heat inside the structure, leading to an accumulation of excess energy (i.e., heat). The atmosphere works the same way, but instead of glass panes, with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (e.g., methane, nitrous oxide). 

In 2024, the last year for which figures are available, the atmospheric concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide reached their highest level in 800,000 years. The concentration of CO₂ (423.9 ppm) was 3.5 ppm more than in 2023 and 152% of the estimated pre-industrial concentration (in 1750). Based on proxy data (e.g., geology, glaciology, etc.), the current concentration of CO₂ is higher than at any time in at least 2 million years.   The increase is due to continued CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels, increased wildfire emissions, and the reduced capacity of the oceans, forests, and other eco-systems to absorb CO₂. 

The past three years were the warmest three in the 176-year combined record of land and sea-level temperatures. The year 2025 is the second or third warmest year, depending on the dataset used, slightly cooler than the record warmth of 2024, due in part to the transition from El Niño at the start of 2024 to La Niña in 2025. 

However, the warming seen at the surface represents just 1% of  the excess energy trapped by greenhouse gases. The vast majority of the excess energy – around 91% – has been absorbed by the oceans in the form of heat. In 2025, the oceans reached a new record high temperature. As well as absorbing the heat, the oceans have also absorbed around 29% of the man-made emissions of CO₂ in the past decade. Although this helps to buffer the effects of climate change, it unfortunately also alters the chemical composition of the ocean water, reducing  the pH in a process known as ocean acidification.

Another 3% of the excess energy warms and melts glacial ice.  The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have both lost significant mass since satellite records began. The last ten years have seen eight of the ten largest ice retreats of individual glaciers since 1950. 

The extent of sea ice in the Arctic has decreased in all seasons since satellite measurements began in 1979, and the annual maximum extent in 2025 was the lowest or second lowest in the observed records. The extent of sea ice around Antarctica had been showing a small long-term increase up until 2015, but since then has decreased significantly and the past four years have seen the four lowest Antarctic sea-ice minima on record. 

Of course, both the warming of the ocean and the melting of glaciers and ice sheets on land have contributed to the long-term global rise in mean sea level. The rate of global sea-level rise has increased since satellite measurements began in 1993, an is rising faster and higher than previously suspected.

Extreme weather, including flooding, droughts, cyclones, typhoons, and hurricanes, continue to drive new and protracted displacement of people globally, with particularly severe consequences in fragile and conflict-affected regions. These events have not only destroyed homes, infrastructure and ecosystems, but also undermine resilience and pose serious risks to people on the move and those already living in displacement  – many of whom are excluded from national preparedness and response plans.

Not mentioned in the U.N. report, but the ongoing war in Iran is not only releasing staggering amounts of CO₂ but will likely result in a rebuilding on the fossil-fuel production infrastructure, locking the world into a renewed cycle of fossil-fuel dependency. While it's impossible to predict all of the regional and global geo-political outcomes of the war, past conflicts have results in mass migrations putting more people at higher risk of the affects on the changing climate.  

 

Fourth Day of the Zenith, 21 of Spring, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Imagine a group of climate scientists trying to verify the record of Earth's temperatures, snowfall, and precipitation for the past 1,000 years. Climate records exist for the past 150 or so years, but I doubt I'm the only one who questions the accuracy and precision of global temperature measurements in the 1870s. So climate scientists examine ice cores from Greenland, tree rings, lake-bottom sediments, and other indirect indicators of climate and temperature.

Now, imagine that those scientists learned that a monastery in Tibet had not only been keeping detailed and meticulous rain- and snowfall records for the past 1,000 years, but also documenting their methods for taking the measurements. I think it's safe to say the scientists would be very interested in examining that record.

But Western scientists, at least, who are studying consciousness seem very unwilling to consider the observations and findings of Buddhist monks in meditation. The remote monasteries of Tibet, China, and Japan have been directly observing human consciousness since the time of the Buddha (roughly 500 B.C.E.) and recording their observations and conclusions, but that's considered "religion" or at the very least "subjective data," and off limits to modern science.

This isn't an "anti-science" screed by any means, but part of the reason that science works and works so well is that it's based on objective and impartial observations, and experiments that are reproducible and findings that can be confirmed by other, independent scientists. But consciousness, by its very definition, is subjective and personal. It's what a person experiences and what it's like to have that experience, and that kind of touchy-feely, intangible, and irreproducible phenomena is complete anathema to science. 

So instead, scientists study neurons and the biological functioning of the brain and learn amazing things about neurology and neuroscience, but don't learn a thing about actual consciousness. They perform psychological studies and experiments on humans, but their observations and findings are reduced to behaviorism, and they miss the boat entirely on consciousness. 

Most of what the West knows about consciousness has come from philosophers, artists, and a handful of renegade psychiatrists. But in Tibet, Kyoto, and elsewhere, there are many monasteries that have functioned like observatories for centuries. Their records are every bit as detailed and precise as astronomical observatories as they study consciousness and the mind, recording their findings and developing theories on their results. 

Scientists have studied the monks, hooking them up to EEGs to record brainwaves and neural activity, etc., but they are missing what it is the monks are observing. It's like an astronomer showing up at any ancient celestial observatory and studying the telescope, not the recorded observations.

Personally, I don't agree with all of the theories that the Tibetans have derived from their observations and study. I think their conclusions are too steeped in Tibetan culture and mysticism, but I'm still intensely interested in what they've observed and even if I find some of their theories implausible, those theories still speak to the experience of their observations.    

 

Third Day of the Zenith, 20th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Castor): I had been wondering about this, but unlike the price per gallon of gasoline, I wasn't sure how to research the answer. But reporting today in The Guardian reveals that the Stable Genius' war in Iran has emitted 5.5 million  tons of greenhouse gases in its first 14 days, roughly the same as a medium-size, fuel-intensive economy like Kuwait and more carbon than the 84 lowest emitting countries combined.

• Destroyed buildings surprisingly constitute the largest element of the estimated carbon cost. About 20,000 civilian buildings have been damaged so far, with total emissions of 2.6M tons of CO₂ equivalent.


• I had thought fuel would be the second biggest source, with US bombers flying in from as far away as England to carry out raids over Iran. However, analysis has shown it to be the second largest, with between 40M and 70M gallons of fuel consumed by aircraft, support vessels, and vehicles in the first 14 days of the war.


• Between 2.5 and 5.9 million barrels of oil have been burned in the war, including the Iranian retaliations on its Gulf neighbors.


• Destroyed military hardware, including four U.S. aircraft, 28 Iranian aircraft, 21 naval vessels, and about 300 missile launchers, resulted in release of 190,000 tons of CO₂ equivalent.


• The bombs, missiles and drones themselves (6,000 U.S. and Israeli strikes inside Iran, about 1,000 missiles and 2,000 drones from Iran, and 1,900 interceptors fired to defend against them) contributed about 60,000 tons of CO₂ equivalent.

In short, the war has been a climate disaster. And just as bad, the disruption to fossil-fuel supplies will probably lead to more oil drilling. Historically, every US‑driven energy shock has been followed by a surge in new drilling, new LNG terminals, and new fossil‑fuel infrastructure. This war risks hard‑wiring another generation of carbon dependence.

This is not a war for security. It’s a war for the political economy of fossil fuels – and the people paying the price are Iranian civilians and working‑class communities in the U.S. and around the world.

Meanwhile, the weather outside is cuckoo-bird crazy pants. Tuesday afternoon, I was out driving in freezing sleet. Today, I walked a 7.1-mile Jackson in shorts and a tee in 80° weather.

 

Second Day of the Zenith, 19th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): The price per gallon of petroleum and gasoline are skyrocketing due to the Stable Genius' war in Iran. The average estimated price in the U.S. is now $3.91/gallon and rising.  "Yeah," the online trolls on antisocial media say, "but it's still cheaper than it was under Obama."

I looked it up. Surprise, surprise, they're not right, but they're also not quite as wrong as I had thought they'd be. 

In 2008, the last year of George Bush's presidency, the average price of gasoline in the U.S. was $3.27/gal, based on data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Due to the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, the price dropped by almost a dollar to $2.35/gal in Obama's first year in office (2009). During the subsequent years, the price rose back up to $3.64 in 2012, and I remember Newt Gingrich campaigning for President carrying a five-gallon gas tank around with him everywhere he went to remind voters of the cost of oil. During Obama's second term, the price dropped down to $3.36 in 2014, and then in 2015 and 2016, the oil market crashed due to a global oversupply of petroleum, and the price of gasoline fell all the way down to $2.10 by Obama's last year. I didn't hear Gingrich commenting on that.

So, in summary, during the Obama years of 2009-2016, the average price for a gallon of gasoline was $2.10 to $3.64, with an average cost of $2.93/gal, which is less than the current $3.91, even at its peak. The trolls are wrong. 

During the Stable Genius' first term, the price of gasoline stayed below $2.64/gal, and then fell all the way to $2.17 during the covid pandemic of 2020 due to low demand.  

In 2022, during Biden's presidency, Putin invaded Ukraine, upsetting European supply lines and causing a global panic. The price of gasoline shot up to $3.97/gal that year before settling back down to $3.30 in Biden's last year (2024). So the MAGA trolls could correctly say that the current price of gasoline is still lower than the peak price under Biden, if only by six cents, but even then that was only for one of his four years. And the reason for the current high prices aren't Putin's invasion of Ukraine or anywhere else, but the Stable Genius' invasion of Iran. He brought this down on himself.

If I were a right-wing troll, I would adjust the numbers for inflation. The peak price of gasoline under Obama in 2012 was $4.30/gal in inflation-adjusted dollars, and the peak price under Biden was $4.10 in 2022, adjusting for inflation. Both peaks are obviously above the current price (for now) of $3.91. But aside from cost comparisons, the reasons for the Obama and Biden peaks weren't the reckless actions of those presidents, while the current spike is unquestionably due to the Stable Genius' adventures in Iran along with his black-out drunk, weekend-news host Secretary of Defense.

 

Day of the Zenith, 18th of Spring, 526 M,E, (Aldebaran): There are six five-day events in the original Universal Solar Calendar, scattered more-or-less randomly throughout the year. When I set up my latest New Revised USC, I divided the year into six seasons instead of the original five, and moved some of the five-day events so that one occurred during each season. 

The five Days of the Zenith were originally the 21st to the 25th days of Spring (April 3 through 7) in Angus MacLise's five-season USC. Those days became the 33rd to 37th days of Spring in my six-season revision. However, I moved them up by a couple weeks to the 18th through 22nd days of Spring so that tomorrow, the Vernal Equinox, falls during a Day of Zenith. Seemed astronomically befitting. 

Just so you know. Let's move on. 

Yesterday, I noted South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist Mark Solms maintains that uncertainty creates feelings, and feelings give rise to consciousness, or at least that's how Michael Pollan explains it. The Buddha taught that ignorance (which we can correlate with "uncertainty," right?) is the necessary precondition, or substrate, for mental models, and mental models are the necessary precondition, or substrate, for consciousness. Feelings don't come up in the Buddha's 12-Fold Chain of Dependent Origination until four more steps after, not before, consciousness.

Everyone loves a controversy and everyone queues up to watch a fight, but I don't think there's necessarily a disagreement between Solms and Buddhism. First, as I pointed out yesterday, the Buddha had a different definition of consciousness than what Solms was talking about. The "hard-problem" consciousness discussed nowadays is closer to what Buddhists call "mind," which is considered the deepest, most basic, essential manifestation of the mind - the metaphorical heart of the mind, the mind before thoughts arise. On the other hand, "consciousness," in Buddhism is considered just the perception, or "feeling," of sensations impinging on the six sense organs. 

Not to make it more complicated, but to give some more perspective, in Buddhism there are actually 18 forms of consciousness, each associated with the six senses, including the mind. There's consciousness associated with the sense organ itself ("eye consciousness" through "mind consciousness"), there's consciousness associated with the sensation ("sight consciousness" through "thought consciousness"), and then there's the realm of each different sense ("realm of sight" through "realm of mind consciousness").         

Introducing a foreign language usually just complicates things, but since the Budhist concepts are so different and the English words so slippery, let's use some Sanskrit terms. Ignorance, in Sanskrit, is avidyā, which I think is essentially the same as Solms' "uncertainty," although I could be wrong (it happens). 

The Buddha's "mental models" are samskāra, which I believe we can all agree is something completely different from Solms' "feeling" (vedanā).   

Finally, the very different concept of consciousness in Buddhism is called vijñāna (not to be confused with vedanā), while the more analogous "mind" is hsin (okay, that one's Chinese - I don't know the Sanskrit equivalent).

So to put it all together, Solms says avidyā gives rise to vedanā, which gives rise to hsin (avidyā > vedanā > hsin). The Buddha's teaching has avidyā existing before samskāra, which exists before vijñāna (avidyā > samskāra > vijñāna), with vedanā appearing only much later and hsin not even mentioned at all. And before there's any more confusion, the >'s above are meant as directional arrows, not "greater than" signs. 

My point is that two statements that may appear to be in opposition are, on closer examination, talking about separate things and therefore not is disagreement. Solms' theory is about avidyā, vedanā, and hsin, and the Buddha's teaching is about avidyā, samskāra, and vijñāna. Also, while Solms has one thing creating or causing the next, the Buddha merely has each as a necessary precondition or substrate of the following, but causation is not necessarily the link between them.

I don't know if all this is illuminating or confusing to others, but I needed to go through the exercise to clarify my own thoughts. This is my blog, and these are the thoughts in my head today, so I'm going to write about what I'm thinking.

Enjoy your Vernal Equinox tomorrow!

 

Day of the Gamelan, 17th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Helios): According to his Wikipedia page, Mark Solms is a South African psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist known for his discovery of the brain mechanisms of dreaming and his use of psychoanalytic methods in contemporary neuroscience. According to Solms, as Michael Pollan explains it, consciousness is generated from feelings, and feelings, in turn are a result of uncertainty. 

One of the hard problems of consciousness is defining just what it is we're talking about. Buddhism has the advantage of two different terms when we talk about consciousness. What the Buddha called "consciousness" (vijnana) wasn't all that big of a deal. In Buddhism, vijnana takes six different forms, each associated with a sense, so that there's a touch consciousness, a visual consciousness, and so on up to consciousness of thought, our awareness of thinking. Each form of vijnana arises from contact of an object with the organ corresponding to a sense, and the brain is considered the organ that perceives thoughts. The Buddha, therefore, would probably have agreed with Solms that consciousness arises from "feeling" our thoughts.   

But consciousness, as considered today, with it's model of self or personhood, it's memory, it's emotional states, and so on, is probably closer to what is called "mind" in Zen. Mind, hsin in Chinese, shin in Sino-Japanese, and kokoro in Japanese, can be translated as mind, heart, spirit, soul, outlook, interiority, thought, and so on. I usually encounter it in the literature as "heart-mind," not meaning the mind of the beating heart, but the deepest, most basic, essential manifestation of the mind - the metaphorical heart of the mind, the mind before thoughts arise. In that latter sense, kokoro, the pure, true mind, the mind before we layer all the bullshit of thoughts and rationalization on it, can also mean absolute reality - the mind beyond distinction between thought and matter, between the abstract and the concrete.

When the Buddha taught in the 12-Fold Chain of Dependent Origination that the appearance of consciousness was dependent on the prior existence of samskara, or mental models, he wasn't talking about mind (kokoro), but merely our awareness of thought (vijnana). Kokoro ultimately refers to the entire Chain of Dependent Origination in which we are born, live, and die, according to contemporary Zen teacher Shohaku Okumura. Ultimately, the chain is a circle - the top link, old age and death, is a precursor to the bottom link, ignorance, so there's no real start or end to the chain. As such, there is no ultimate cause or origin to mind, conscious experience as we think of it today, in Buddhism, making speculation on what it arises from a meaningless question. 

 

Krakatoa Day, 16th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Electra): From what I've seen in my own personal experience,  few teachings of the Buddha are more misunderstood than the 12-Fold Chain of Dependent Origination. 

I'm not going to get into the whole thing here. Suffice it to say, the teaching presents a dozen conceptual links, from old age and death down to ignorance, each dependent on the link below it for its existence. The confusion starts because many assume that the chain is somehow causal, and each link somehow creates the next link above. 

Based on how I just framed it, you probably suspect that I don't agree with that view. The link just below the last or highest link on the chain, old age and death, is birth. You can't have old age and death without first having birth, but it doesn't feel right to say that birth is the cause of old age and death (although it's sometimes said the life is a fatal condition).    

No, I see each link as a necessary substrate to the link above it. For example, you can't have fire without fuel, but fuel doesn't necessarily cause fire. Other phenomena, like ignition and oxygen, are also reuired substrates. Similarly, you can't have old age and death without birth, even though birth doesn't cause old age and death.

We can apply that substrate model to the first three, bottom links of the chain: ignorance, samskara, and consciousness. I use the Sanskrit samskara rather than the various English translations, because those various translations, which include intention, impulse, mental models, mental formations, and even memory, cause a lot of the confusion. Is ignorance the substrate for intention or is it the substrate for memory? Does consciousness require impulse or does it require mental formations (whatever those are) as a substate?

I think it can be readily shown that the Buddha meant mental models or mental formations, which are basically the same thing, as are Erich Fromm's "mental maps." Ignorance does create our mental models and they don't spontaneously arise out of ignorance, but we form them to help us understand what we don't know. As Michael Pollan puts it, we form them to help us predict the behaviors of the world around us in order to keep us safe. And one of those mental models is that the thinker is a separate thing from the rest of the universe - "I" am somewhere inside this skull, and outside of it are "others." It's "me" that's experiencing these senses, storing these memories, and forming these models.

"Consciousness," in this sense, means an awareness of one's self.  And it's our mental model of a separate self that's a necessary substrate for consciousness to appear. The awareness is consciousness - we're aware of our self - and while the mental model doesn't create the awareness, it creates the object of awareness. So without the model, there's nothing to be aware of and hence no consciousness, just like no fuel means no fire.

The rest of the 12-Fold Chain can be viewed the same way - to the next step, name and form, and so on all the way up to birth and old age and death. But right now, I've been thinking mostly about consciousness.  

 

Day of the Doldrums, 15th of Spring, 526 M.E. (Deneb): Are robots sentient? Are they conscious and do they have an inner self-identity? 

I'm not talking about your Roomba or one of those automatons on an assembly line in some food-processing plant. I'm talking about the synths, cyborgs, replicants, and androids that we see in science fiction. Yes, I know they don't exist yet, but if you were to meet Ash or Bishop from the first Alien movies IRL, would you consider it to have the same level of consciousness and self-awareness as a human?

You might think you have a ready answer in your head, but if you've never met one how would you know? You might think you're answer is "no," but if you were to actually encounter one is it possible you'd be swayed by it's personality and presence? Or if your answer is "yes," might you be turned off by some artificiality in its appearance and by its formulaic conversation?

If you saw the movie Companion (spoiler ahead), did you feel differently about the synth when she was in "girlfriend mode" than you did toward the end when her robotic arm was exposed and she was pretty indiscriminately killing people?  

Video games are another way to find out. No, games are not real life, and yes, they're scripted and often try to deliberately lead you to one conclusion or the other. But I argue that in the immersion that occurs over the 40 to 100 hours it takes to complete a modern game, your true feelings toward the robots will come out. You might go all "bad guy" against them in a game, like the Black Hat in the first season of Westworld, or you might respect their autonomy, like his white-hat alter ego. 

The Fallout games have a wide variety of robots and synths to help you figure just where your own personal uncanny valley lies, especially Fallout 4. Some robots are far from human, like the Mr. Gutsy's and Codsworth, who look more like a flying octopus than a person, or the Robobrains that look like giant Roombas with a glass dome containing what appears to be a human brain. The Protectrons are classic, 1950's Robby the Robot robots, and others are sleek, even sexy, bipeds, like the Assaultrons. Then there's the synths, who range from the first generation, who are obviously manufactured, to second gen characters like Nick Valentine, to third-generation models who are indistinguishable from organic humans. A subplot in the game concerns citizens of the Commonwealth becoming paranoid thinking their friends and families are being kidnapped and replaced with identical synths. There's even a human girl who becomes convinced that she herself is actually a synth.

Playing the game, I had to problem smashing, shooting, or otherwise destroying the Mr. Gutsy's and the Robobrains, and the Assaultrons were so aggressive and deadly I'd kill them without remorse before they first killed me. But I got squeamish about harming the synths, even first generation, unless first attacked. Were they like people with memories, desires, hopes, fears, and an inner life, or were they just machines useful only for whatever purpose they were manufactured? I'd no more abuse Nick Valentine than I would any human NPC in the game.

There's a pivotal scene in the game Detroit: Become Human where your feelings and attitudes towards synthetics are really put to the test. In the scene, two detectives go to the home of the inventor of the game's exact-replica synths. The inventor is similar to the Oscar Isaac character in the movie Ex Machina. The manipulative genius tells them he has information about the murder they're investigating, but will only share it if one of the detectives first shoots a beautiful female droid point blank in the head to test his theory about attitudes toward androids. You, as the player, have to make the choice to pull the trigger and kill what looks and sounds like a person and possibly solve the murder, or walk away empty handed but having spared a "life." The game could go either way - you're truly free to choose. What would you do - pull the trigger or hit the road? 

If you haven't played these games, you might think you know how you'd respond in these situations, but when playing the games, it feels different after actually encountering the entities in question, interacting with them for days and weeks on end. Especially in  the Detroit game, as the beautiful android in jeopardy is also the voice and face of the game's AI that has been assisting you the whole game.

What I'm saying is that the game experience can give you a more honest, visceral indication of how you'd actually respond than the theoretical, intellectual answer you might think you have.

FYI, I spared the woman in Detroit. Fuck that asshole inventor and his manipulative head games - I'm not breaking so much as a piggy bank much less killing a droid for his egotistical amusement.

 

Day of the Palisades, 14th of Spring 526 M.E. (Castor): I'm thoroughly enjoying my reading of Michael Pollan's A World Appears. I'm reading it very slowly, as every few pages I come across one statement or another that makes me want to put the book down and think for a while. Meditate on it a little, and then come back and re-read it again to make usure I got it right before moving on.

According to Pollan, in just one of many fascinating observations, there's a leading model of perception known as the Bayesian mind. "The Bayesian brain hypothesis," Pollan writes, "holds that perception is less a matter of taking the world in through our senses than a matter of generating a continuous stream of predictions about what's happening in the world based on our prior experiences and the laws of probability." 

"Our senses exist," Pollan writes, "mainly to refine, or error-correct, our minds' best guesses as to what we're experiencing." In other words, our minds don't exist to interpret our senses, our senses exist to interpret our minds. 

This is a most worthy addition to the set of ideas I've come to rely upon in my understanding of samskara, mental models, and subconscious thought. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Erich Fromm wrote, "Man needs a map of his natural and social world, without which he would be confused and unable to act purposefully and consistently. He would have no way of orienting himself and of finding for himself a fixed point that permits him to organize all the impressions that impinge upon him."

"Whether he believed in sorcery and magic as final explanations of all events, or in the spirit of his ancestors as guiding his life and fate, or in an omnipotent god who will reward or punish him, or in the power of science to give answers to all human problems - from the standpoint of his need for a frame of orientation, it does not make any difference. His world makes sense to him, and he feels certain about his ideas through the consensus with those around him. Even if the map is wrong, it fulfills its psychological function. But the map was never entirely wrong - nor has it ever been entirely right, either. It has always been enough of an approximation to the explanation of phenomena to serve the purpose of living."

Fromm found it impressive that he could find no culture or individual in which there did not exist such a frame of orientation. "Often an individual may disclaim having any such overall picture and believe that he responds to the various phenomena and incidents of life from case to case, as his judgment guides him. But it can be easily demonstrated that he takes his own philosophy for granted, because to him it is only common sense, and he is unaware that all his concepts rest upon a commonly accepted frame of reference."   

Fromm's description of our "mental maps" is strikingly similar to the Buddhist samskara (mental formation) and to Pollen's description of the Bayesian mind. A person develops mental models based on their prior experience, including what they've been taught and what was impressed upon them, and then can predict the likely events of the near future based on that model. In the Bayesian model, we don't perceive the object per se as much as a potential for a certain outcome, be it danger or pleasure.

For example, two different people might see the same dog at the same time. One person might perceive a chance of getting bit or at least aggressively barked at. The other person might perceive a "good boy," a loyal and nonjudgmental friend. The difference is based on prior experience and what they've been taught. Similar are the differences when two separate people see someone of a different gender, race, or religion, or an immigrant, or a homeless person. We're perceiving imagined potential, not the actual phenomenon. We're constantly sizing everything up, categorizing our surroundings and what we encounter as either "dangerous" or "pleasurable," and frequently ignoring the rest that don't fall firmly into either category.

The Bayesian model seems to exist in the sweet spot of the Venn diagram of samskara, potential, and subconscious thought.