Having just switched again to Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the U.S., it’s a good opportunity for me to express my misgivings on the matter. I’m not going to delve into the history or motivations: that’s what Wikipedia is for. The main take-away will be what it says about—and does to—our perceived relationship to the world.
The parents of my friend from Puerto Rico nailed it. He had moved to Rhode Island for college, and called them every week at a certain time. A few months in, he warned them that next week he’d be calling an hour later than normal (as they would perceive it) due to the time change. “What kind of arbitrary shenanigan is that?! You can’t go around just changing the clocks! Balderdash!” I’m sure that’s the exact translation from Spanish. In any case, I’m in total agreement!
The Phenomenon
Noon is loosely defined as the middle of the day, when the sun is at its zenith—crossing the north–south meridian. This was the cardinal moment of the maritime day, when sextants marked the apex of the sun’s daily journey across the sky and hourglasses were reset accordingly: eight bells; change of watch (not wristwatch, in this case). By comparing local noon to an accurate chronometer (clock)—set to Greenwhich time, for instance—one could ascertain longitude on the planet, which transformed navigation and quelled many anxieties about being blown onto a lee shore in the dark of night.
The shock being experienced in Washington D.C. since January 20 is exposing gaping holes in the fantasies we told ourselves were rock-solid truths—lasting for whole (gasp) generations!. It is also important to admit that this is democracy working as intended: a popular majority said yes, and—let’s face it—might well do so again if a vote were held tomorrow.
Several of my recent posts have stressed the virtual reality aspects of modernity and our tendency to take refuge in flimsy mental models disconnected from biophysical and ecological reality. An earlier post cautioned against falling into the trap of aiming for fantasy political perfection. Here, we’ll look at the holes that are opening up.
As the Trump Administration rattles cages and turns things upside-down, I keep seeing headlines that effectively ask: “Is that even legal?”
Isn’t the mere fact that legal status is uncertain a glaring indicator that our legal system is little more than a bolus of small rocks held together by a few strands of spider web? No? Does that image fail to work for you: too random and specific? Whatever. You get the point.
I’ve been dancing around some new themes that haven’t entirely come into focus (and might never), but I’ll try to pull some of it together in this post. I apologize for a pattern of putting out half-chewed perspectives, but that’s my meat-brain just doing its best.
Our culture is fond of creating virtual realities (make-believe worlds) and then spending much of our time in these alternative worlds. In fact, modernity itself is a type of virtual reality, in that it cannot be a long-lasting way of living on the planet: a temporary retreat from a deeper, broader, and more ancient reality.
In the context of virtual realities, this post compares loathsome modernity to loathsome video games, and the mental miscues they share in common. While brought up on video games and modernity, I have developed allergic reactions to both, and only now made the connection. It’s a single root cause.
Both modernity and video games offer addictive rewards that prove to be empty where it really counts. We can do better.
I recently stumbled on a song from 1988 by the Talking Heads, called (Nothing But) Flowers. It’s hard to believe I would not have heard this song before. It caps off the “Best Of” album, after all. But, to be fair, a sampling of the album reveals that 8 of the 18 songs are unfamiliar to me. So, maybe it never hit my ears.
Anyway, listening as if for the first time, I’m captivated by the song. Although it’s not perfect, it hits themes that few songs do. What I’ll do is quote all the lyrics and intersperse comments. I’ll put my interpretive slant on the piece, which may or may not accurately reflect the intent of its creators. So it goes with these things. Sometimes the original intent isn’t even all that important or sacred. In this case, I don’t sense I’m far off the mark, but just want to be clear that I do not claim to have perfect knowledge of the creative intent, nor am I trying to achieve such.
We all appreciate that human individuals progress through stages of cognitive development on the way to adulthood. A toddler is simply not equipped to run a country (hold your quips): the brain hasn’t fully developed. Infants love the game of peek-a-boo precisely because they have not yet cemented the idea of object permanence. Language capability improves over many years—decades, actually. Brains are not “fully” developed until the late twenties (yet assert mastery starting in the teen years).
But, what does “fully” developed mean? It means significant further development in structure or capability is not to be expected. Does it mean that brains reach some theoretical ultimate capability—no more improvements possible—or do they maybe stop short of perfection? Why would evolution produce anything substantially better than what provides sufficient selective advantage in an ecological context, in simultaneous consideration of all other organism attributes and the biodiverse and social environments in which they operate? The tangled difficulty of that sentence barely hints at the immense contextual complexity involved.
So, every last one of us ceases brain development well short of some notional limit. Does that stopping point cross the threshold of being able to master all knowledge or understanding about Life, the Universe, and Everything? Of course not. Evidence abounds. So, we will never comprehend it all, given our limited meat-brains.
All this echoes things I’ve said before. What’s new in this post is what I hope will be a helpful analogy to how adults present ideas to children possessing less-developed brains—thus the Nursery Rhyme title. Since adult human brains also stop short of “full” development, how might we expect our imperfect brains to interact with what we can’t fully understand? We encounter this conundrum all the time in giving “sufficient” accounts to children that are effective, even if they must be over-simplified or distorted to get the point across. So, how would a hypothetical species possessing far more wisdom explain the incomprehensible to us, as if we were children to them?
Which way will the coin decide to land? Image by ICMA Photos.
In my continuing pursuit of humility as an antidote to modernity’s human supremacy illness, the atoms that constitute who I am take issue with lofty and self-aggrandizing concepts of idealism, dualism, and free will—replaced by the unflattering material world and its staggering wealth of emergent complexity. I have argued that opposite of lacking imagination and being reductionist, such a view far exceeds our imaginative capacity and is in fact rather expansive and open-ended next to facile short-cut cop-outs that sweep mind-boggling complexity under the rug by pretending that constructs like mind, consciousness, soul, God, or Santa Claus are real.
One stubborn sticking point is the beguiling illusion that “we” are separate from “our” corporeal bodies, owning and controlling them, somehow. This notion is prevalent, despite zero evidence that we are anything but corporeal, and heaps of evidence to the contrary. A less supremacist variant allows that all life, down to microbes, are endowed with this material override to exert control and autonomy over their environments, but still demand a line of separation between life and inanimate collections of matter. An amoeba suddenly changing course in reaction to its environment is, in this view, ontologically different than a hurricane changing course in reaction to its environment.
Granted, life is amazing and exhibits unambiguous behavioral differences compared to, say, rocks (hint: check the complexity of internal structure). A materialist, mechanistic basis does not in any way diminish life, although that’s often the regrettable reaction from someone who takes it on faith that transcendent mystery accounts for life’s splendor—rather than intuition-busting eons of emergent material fabulousness. Well, it turns out that life is incredible no matter what inconsequential thoughts we form about it. In any case, the point that I will develop in this post is that “decisions” are carried out at every level from electrons to ants, but are at no point fundamentally operating on a different basis.
Depending on how one defines “decisions,” either electrons and bats carry them out by the same rules, or neither can be said to be making “free” decisions. Whatever the case, electrons and bats are on similar footing when it comes to “decisions,” albeit at vastly different scales of complexity. Given enough information and background, the decisions by either are not surprising, even if not precisely predictable. Now, I do identify a difference between living decisions and inanimate decisions, importantly, but it’s a subtle one that I’ll wind my way toward.
Happy Newt Year! Those who have followed me for a long time have probably noticed a marked uptick in the frequency of newt mentions in the last few years. What’s the deal with that? It seems so random. Am I engaging in occult practices that require eye of newt?
The simplest version is that when I moved from San Diego back to the Pacific Northwest (had lived in Seattle prior to being “rented” by California for 18 years), I landed in newt territory.
My street is largely undeveloped, leaving plenty of forested critter habitat. A slow-moving creek—dammed by beavers into more of a pond—runs a few hundred meters away, which anchors the local newts. When it rains, especially in fall and spring, we find newts slowly prowling the area. Just as lost keys are more likely to be found under a lamp-post simply because light allows them to be seen, newts are frequently found on streets and driveways because they stand out on such plain surfaces. I suspect it goes deeper than this, in that they also hunt worms, which find their way onto pavement during the rain, and are also perhaps easier for the newts to spot. Rainy time is dinnertime!
I could never have predicted it a few years back, but my wife and I find ourselves smitten by the newts. We love and adore them. I hope this post provides at least a little appreciation as to why.
It’s Tuesday morning and I didn’t prepare a new post, having been busy helping birds and bats. Maybe, though, the holidays have given you more free time than usual, so that you can afford to take in a podcast episode or two. If so, this post introduces two conversations I’ve had that do a decent job of capturing my recent perspectives. Below, I provide links and overviews of the content of each, in the form of the questions I was asked. Do you already know how I’ll answer each one?
Human Nature Odyssey: Astrophysics for a New Stone Age
About a year ago, I recommended a fantastic podcast called Human Nature Odyssey, by Alex Leff. If you haven’t listened to it, the previous link allows you to get up to speed on past episodes. Alex reluctantly read an assigned book at age 14 that changed his life, as the book has a tendency to do. That book is Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, which I have touted in a number of posts. It was a key part of the Reading Journey I laid out a while back, further expounded in a dedicated post, and formed a large part of the inspiration behind my proposed Religion of Life.
Alex and I have had a few exchanges over the last year, and he honored me with a spot in his season 2 lineup of Human Nature Odyssey, titled Astrophysics for a New Stone Age. Alex edited the conversation into a tight dialog, adding his customary soundscapes to create a podcast having a higher-than-normal production quality. Paraphrasing Alex’s questions, here is how the flow went:
What initially drew you to astrophysics?
Why do you call yourself a “recovering” astrophysicist?
How do you view science, now from the outside?
What inspired you to start Do the Math?
Wait: we’re not going to colonize space?
How can you say that your “space laser” is far less impressive than a simple amoeba?
How were you influenced by Daniel Quinn’s writings?
Could you describe your cancer diagnosis for modernity?
Why use the vague term “modernity?”
The modernity cancer has perks: can’t we keep those?
Are you suggesting that we go back to the Stone Age?
Do you still lament losing astrophysics if modernity collapses?
Are you using a map and compass on your journey?
What aspects of science are valuable in a post-modernity world?
I like the conversation that emerged, and hope you do as well. It should be available through most podcast apps, including this Apple link, and also via YouTube (audio only).
Marriage Proposal (Teaser)
The second conversation was with Josh Kearns on Doomer Optimism (episode 246). And, yes, a marriage proposal pops up. This is a longer conversation than the previous one, happening to cover some similar ground (astrophysics, lunar ranging). But it also delves into religion, which I’m not sure I’ve discussed in other podcasts. It then touches on the fertility decline story and demographic modeling. Near the end, I think Josh implies that I’m fat, or will soon become so. Here is a paraphrased list of questions Josh put to me:
What does it mean to be a recovering astrophysicist?
How could you do lunar ranging if the landings were faked?
What’s at stake in the potential collapse of modernity?
What’s it like to shed the mythology of progress, and does that make you an outsider now?
You define modernity as starting with agriculture: is that going too far?
What’s your plan? Can this be a curriculum? Who’s your audience? Youth salvation?
Are we preparing today’s students for yesterday’s world?
What are your triage priorities: institutional or individual?
Can you explain what human supremacy is and why you focus on it?
What is your religious background and journey?
You seem to have arrived at a new religion of sorts: can you describe this?
Are there inroads to transform religions by carrying forward their best parts?
Big shift: why is fertility rate falling rapidly and globally?
How many completely wrong predictions can experts make before they give up?
How can global energy use peak before global population peaks?
What is the economic impact of declining energy use?
If facing near-term demand-driven decline, should we start prepping now?
Is there anything people fret over that they really don’t need to worry about?
As it happens, I speak slowly enough that playback at 1.5x speed is well-tolerated.
Tangelic Talks
About a month after this post went live, Episode 3 of a new series came out, so I’m appending it here. Here is the page for the episode. Note that a short article accompanies the piece, and additional questions and responses that didn’t make the edited conversation appear in textual form lower on the page. It was AI-generated, so might have some errors. The hosts were somewhat new to my line of thinking, so that this episode might be appropriate for others who haven’t been exposed to such reflections before. For regular consumers of my content, it’s going to be pretty familiar material. The direct YouTube link is embedded below.
Resistance Radio
Also out after this initial posting (February 16, 2025) is a second conversation between myself and Derrick Jensen (the first is linked from this earlier post, which covered modernity and the demographic fertility decline). You can find the conversation at Resistance Radio, or using this link to the episode. The conversation explores growth and its limits, as well as the impossibility of even holding steady at current levels. We also talk about why the obvious is obscure to mainstream culture, and what I would do if I were an energy czar. Derrick asks his guests to suggest sounds from nature for the intro and outro. For the first, I picked a chestnut-backed chickadee (whose chipper sounds make me want to laugh with them). For this, it’s a Douglas squirrel. I wish newts made noises I could use.
We’ve all heard the outrageously skewed statistics. The top 1%, or 0.1%, or even 0.01% of humans control an outsized fraction of total wealth (something like 30%, 15%, and over 5%, respectively). Because our culture values the fictional construct of money far more than is warranted, and the ultra-rich have a hell of a lot of it, they acquire status and access to power unavailable to almost everyone else. How can such a small fraction of the population possess such a disproportionate share of this resource—one that we’ve decided bestows influence and power? It doesn’t seem at all fair.
But, money isn’t the only disproportionate power-conferring asset on this planet. What else does our culture value above almost all else? Brains. What—are we zombies?! Large brains are what (we tell ourselves) set us apart from mere animals—taken to justify a sense superiority. Earth belongs to us. We can do whatever we want, because we’re the ones with the big brains: the self-declared winner of evolution—as if it’s even possible to have a winner in an interdependent community. Through innovation and technology development, we now wield god-like power over the rest of life on Earth—for a short time, anyway, until it becomes obvious that “winning” translates to “everybody loses.”
Given our similar tendencies to overvalue money and brains, I was motivated to compare inequality in brain mass within the community of life to the gross inequality we abhor in financial terms. Is it as bad? Worse? Humans constitute 2.5% of animal biomass, and 0.01% of all biomass on the planet. We are also one of perhaps 10 million species, which in those terms means we represent only 0.00001% of biodiversity. Any way you slice it, we are a small sliver of Life on Earth—while managing to dominate virtually every ecological domain. As our culture tells it, humans are the deserving elites.
What fraction of the planet’s brain wealth do we possess? To be clear, in performing this analysis, I am not making the case that brains are what matters—far from it. But in our culture, our brains are cherished and essentially worshiped for their unique capacity in terms of ingenuity, allowing us to defy the limits that all other species “suffer.” What is our disproportionate share of brain mass? Is it as bad as 15% or 30%, like our egregiously-lopsided wealth inequality?
