Live from Austin!

Ten books on my bookshelf which almost certainly aren’t on yours.

1. "Threaded Interpretive Languages" by Loeliger. Describes how to build FORTH systems. Published by Byte back when FORTH was mainstream. (Why, yes, I am that old.)
2. A.R.T.H.U.R. by Lawrence Lerner. Poetry from an imaginary AI. Much better than RACTER.
3. "The Third Word War: Apostrophe Theory" by Ian Lee. Starts off as a catalog of grocers’ apostropes, mutates into a collection of photographic meta-references and arch puns.
4. "Fortran 5" by Simon Leonard. Three surreal stories by one of the guys behind the bands I Start Counting, Fortran 5, and Komputer.
5. "RCL20". A celebration of 20 years of the Handheld and Portable Computer Club. Contains the story behind the design of a number of classic HP RPN calculators. Gift of the editor.
6. "Zenarchy" by Kerry W. Thornley. One of the authors of Principia Discordia; neopagan, libertarian, friend of Lee Harvey Oswald and allegedly part of the conspiracy to assassinate JFK. This book is his often-overlooked approach to Zen Buddhism. Copies seem to be going for $95 and up on Amazon, but I’m keeping mine.
7. "Zen Without Zen Masters" by Camden Benares. Continues the non-mainstream Western approach to Zen theme. Apparently the author was a friend of Kip Thornley. Like Zenarchy, this book is frequently hilarious, and shouldn’t a true religion be funny?
8. "Think Tank" by Roger Langley. "The Prisoner" fan fiction.
9. "Nineteen Ninety-Four". Novelization of the radio series. Think "1984 meets the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy".
10. "Bad Shave: The Story of Baby Bird So Far". Compilation of articles about lo-fi pop god Stephen Jones, aka Baby Bird, aka Babybird (the band).

Previous entries, withdrawn because they are insufficiently rare:

1. "Twitching and Shattered" by Frank Key. The gentleman is an acquired taste, and this is a taste I acquired back in 1990 or so. His books for children, such as "Derek the Dust Particle", are truly inspired, and recommended if you want your children to grow up to be like me.
2. "Beat Your Relatives To A Bloody Pulp" by Maxim Décharné. A Narrative Concerning the Proper Chastisement of Personages Without Whom &c &c.
3. "Literary Machines" by Ted Nelson. Describes the design of the Xanadu system. Self-published by Ted.
4. Bob Black, "Friendly Fire". Compilation of articles by everyone’s favorite anarchist.

I did one of those online religion questionnaires. I’m not going to reproduce the whole list of what it suggested for me; the interesting part is it rated Buddhism above Secular Humanism. (Specifically, Therevada Buddhism.)

Intellectually, that’s spot on, but the problem I always have is observance. Somehow I seem to be unable to sustain a practice of regular meditation. And without at least that, I don’t see that I could honestly describe myself as a Buddhist.

On the plus side, I managed to keep exercising through until the Christmas vacation; and now that the new year has started and my back has settled down a bit, I’m back to exercising daily, at least during the week. (It didn’t happen this weekend, for various timing reasons.)

Most people manage to keep going to church or otherwise practicing religion, but fail to exercise. I suppose I should consider myself lucky that my problem is the other way around.

Scientific American recently published a special edition titled The Hidden Mind. While a few of the articles were disappointing, the magazine finished with a true gem written by David J. Chalmers. It attempts to address the difficult problem of consciousness; not the problem of how to achieve it on a Monday morning, but the even tougher problem of how to explain it. It’s titled The Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and I recommend that you go read it.

One of the things I’ve often wondered about is why we are conscious and self-aware. I say “we” because I assume other people are conscious too, based on their observed behavior. Cats also behave as if they have consciousness and self-awareness; it’s pretty clear that they have pride, which to me requires that they have some concept of self-image.

Looking at living creatures, it seems pretty clear to me that there’s a spectrum of consciousness. At one end, you have organisms like yeast and ants, which basically behave like blobs of chemicals or little automata. Further along the scale you find birds, mice, and other animals that rely largely on instinct. Then you reach the otters, cats, dogs, and other creatures that appear to experience emotions, solve complex problems, play with things for fun, and communicate with each other.

The most likely hypothesis to my mind is that consciousness is some kind of emergent property of brains of sufficient complexity, which are structured in an appropriate way. Could a machine become conscious? I see no reason why not, though it might require a machine very unlike a regular computer.

All this gets me no closer to being able to say what consciousness is, though. I can’t explain it in terms of electric fields in a network, or quantum patterns of electrons in the brain, and nobody else seems to be able to either.

Chalmers proposes a radical hypothesis: What if consciousness is actually a fundamental feature of the universe, like gravity or electromagnetism? What if it isn’t reducible to other things?

I’ve been pondering this idea, and I think it makes a lot of sense. For starters, it offers a neat way to sidestep the awkward question of what an observer is in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Perhaps an observer is simply a sufficient quantity or density of consciousness that has become entangled with the quantum events in question. Maybe physicists will one day be able to come up with equations specifying exactly how much consciousness it takes to collapse the wave function.

To go back to consciousness-as-emergent-property, perhaps consciousness is a kind of stuff that arises when certain kinds of information processing neural networks get sufficiently complex—just like gravitational fields arise when enough particles with mass group together in physical space.

Chalmers points out that the idea of consciousness as a fundamental property is very compatible with some of the recent theories from people like John A. Wheeler and Stephen Wolfram, who have suggested that perhaps information is fundamental to the physics of the universe.

There’s still another reason why I like Wheeler’s proposal, and it’s even less politically correct (from a scientific point of view) than Stephen Wolfram’s ego. See, it seems to me that consciousness being a fundamental property of the universe is remarkably compatible with Buddhist (and, for that matter, Hindu) cosmology.

Buddhism and Hinduism talk of a universal‘field’ of consciousness which pervades all things. Our individual consciousnesses are described as being like waves on an ocean. When we die, the waves collapse, and new waves are formed. (A common misconception is that Buddhism believes in reincarnation of the Shirley McLaine sort, where the intact soul travels from body to body.) I thought about waves of consciousness coalescing around complex neural networks, and it suddenly struck me how much the whole thing sounded like the Higgs field, and gravitational forces arising near massive objects.

Can I prove any of this? Of course not. But it’s the best working hypothesis I’ve got so far.

From NorthWest News Channel 8:

A Zen Buddhist group’s plan to remodel a former Clatskanie elementary school into a monastery and seminary is upsetting some people in this fishing and logging town.

A meeting sponsored by the Buddhists this week drew more than 200 people, many of whom objected to the proposal.

“Do you not see the darkness?” Linda Fischer, a Christian, asked of others in the audience. “The aura of Satan is taking a foothold. We do not want Buddhism in here.”

[…]

Loren Dummer, pastor of the Gateway Worship Center, the Assembly of God congregation, said the Buddhists pose a clear spiritual threat to the community.

His main concern is for the city’s youth, who he thinks are targets of the Buddhists.

“Our goal is to protect those that have not yet accepted Christ,” he said.

Yes, folks. Buddhists walk among us, undetected. And they are preying on our children!