Author Archives: tmurphy

My Ishmael

Posted on by
12
Photo of book cover by Tom Murphy.

Having first covered Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael in extensive fashion, then The Story of B in a mega-post, it was basically inevitable that I would finish the loose trilogy and offer a treatment of My Ishmael.

This third book in the series connects much more closely with the first book than did “B”—both in time and space. It follows the relationship between Ishmael, the wise gorilla teacher, and a precocious teenager named Julie who studies under Ishmael in overlap with an oblivious Alan Lomax (narrator/pupil from the first book).

As Ishmael customizes lessons to individual students, we see that Julie’s education is complementary to Alan’s—conveniently justifying a whole different book providing a new set of provocative insights.

Format

The book is arranged into 36 short, chronological chapters. Headings below reflect chapter titles and starting page numbers in parentheses (1998 printing). As I did for the other books, I mainly stay away from narrative elements—focusing instead on lessons. The exception in this case is in the setup. Part of my rationale is to encourage folks to read the original, treating this post as highlights of the “boring” portions—ideal for a refresher after having read the book.

All the chapter titles and page numbers are represented until the end of lessons, when the book shifts to more of a traditional novel. Note that the 20th Century Daniel Quinn often uses “man” to mean “humans” more broadly. As in the other treatments, I attempt to confine my own slant to [square brackets].

Continue reading →

Views: 779

Death as a Nothing-Burger

Posted on by
46
Image by LEONSTORETR from Pixabay.

I’ve had two posts in a row about the phenomenon of Life, so it is perhaps fitting to round things out with a post on death. Despite the fact that one cannot enjoy life without the accompaniment of death in its many forms, death is not a suitable subject for polite company in our culture.

Before discontinuing after a few episodes (due to excessive violence), my wife and I started watching the American Primeval show on Netflix. One scene contrasted most members of modernity who—when threatened by Native Americans—blubber and shriek at the prospect of death against one rare individual who showed no fear. While not explicit on this point, I could believe the Native Americans would perceive most members of modernity as being infantilized, pampered, useless, “full-grown children” who had not learned to accept the reality of life—including its requisite, ubiquitous mortality. Or, is that just me, projecting?

Fear of death pervades our culture: many among us cringe at its mention, and indeed structure whole lives around elaborate stories of denial: we can’t really ever be dead, surely!

It’s understandable: having never experienced death ourselves, our brains have no point of contact and cannot conceive what it is like. The vacuum begs to be filled by any fanciful notion that displaces fear of the great unknown.

But, I’ll make a point that many of us actually have experienced something close enough to death to be surprisingly informative. In another sense, all of us have “experienced” our own death state. I’ll explore these “experiences” and why I believe they tell us almost everything we need to know about the state of death. Indeed: if we’re open to observation, we actually already possess a highly probable sense of what happens after we die! As far as I can tell, it turns out to be a nothing-burger—which can be either disappointing or relieving (or just “whatever”) depending on perspective.

Continue reading →

Views: 2029

What is Life?

Posted on by
26
By Conselleria de Medi Ambient, from Wikimedia Commons.

No doubt about it: Life is truly amazing. I mean, the things it gets up to far exceed our imaginations! (Just watch a few dozen Ze Frank “True Facts” videos to scratch the surface.) It hardly seems necessary to invest in a post to elucidate what constitutes Life, when a small child will correctly identify instances almost every time. Living beings demonstrate awareness about their surroundings, taking actions broadly in service of goals to thrive and reproduce. An amoeba marks itself as alive because we witness its purposeful mobility to secure food and evade danger.

Yet, living beings are undeniably made of atoms—atoms that do not appear in any close investigation to operate outside the usual rules of physics. Our sensation of awareness, experience of color perception, etc. seems so far removed from physics that the intractable connection is obvious to neither child nor adult. How could this awareness (what we label “consciousness”) possibly arise out of inanimate particles obeying physics without some “special sauce” unavailable to mere “machines” like computers or robots? It seems prima facie absurd, so it requires an unusual suspension of disbelief to submit to the baffling prospect.

How is it even possible, though, that inanimate matter can constitute Life? In a word: feedback. Life is feedback. The sun is of huge importance to Life, but we would not say that it is alive itself even though it actively engages with the universe and is a critical contributor to living beings on Earth. It’s continuance as a star is not contingent on these interactions. No feedback loop makes fusion in the core care what happens in Las Vegas. As an aside, I resist dividing lines and include the Sun (and everything else) in a living whole: just try doing without it!

Continue reading →

Views: 1817

Rivulets of Life

Posted on by
Rivulets; photo by Tom Murphy: CC-BY-NC.

I spend probably too much of my time (and now yours) trying to work out the apparent differences between animate and inanimate arrangements of atoms. In practice it’s not at all hard to tell one from the other, even if a mass spectrometer would confirm that all the same atoms comprise the collections. Children easily differentiate one from the other. Isn’t that definitive?

In a similar vein, it’s not hard to tell a star from a brown dwarf, even though they have essentially identical compositions. The one having more than 8% the mass of our sun will ignite fusion and light up, while the one not “tall enough to go on the ride” will continue sulking as a dim, warm lump.

It’s not hard to tell the difference in behavior between a piece of paper fluttering to the floor and the exact same piece wadded tightly and dropping straight down. A clear sheet of glass or ice becomes an opaque white powder simply by crushing it thoroughly. A log looks and acts much differently before and after burning, even though no atoms were created or destroyed—most are dispersed as invisible gas. Arrangement matters.

But I want to poke a little deeper and identify an arrangement that we would never call animate, yet displays many of the hallmarks of Life. This is my clumsy attempt at doing so. The purpose is not to find an exact match in this example, because that’s impossible: identifying flaws is easy sport. Rather, this exercise provides a window that might allow our crippled imaginations to dimly grasp how Life might develop behaviors that appear purposeful in the context of evolutionary feedback. So, instead of focusing on imperfections, the challenge is: are you able to make out the shape beyond the distracting foreground fog? What new insights does this perspective offer? How might you build upon it and make it even better?

This is the first in a two-part series on what constitutes Life, as far as I can gather.

Continue reading →

Views: 1860

The Writing on the Wall

Posted on by
Image by Greg Montani from Pixabay.

Almost as if done deliberately to demonstrate mental incapacity, I recently found myself making a connection that was staring me in the face for years but that I never recognized. Surely, scads more sit waiting in plain view, yet will never be smoked by me as long as I live.

In this case, several overt clues tried waving it in my face, but I remained oblivious. I feel like my former best-buddy cat who was always mesmerized by water, never tiring of watching it slosh, splash, and splatter. My wife and I once took the cat(s) on a reluctant car trip passing along the coast of northern California. The road came right up on the beach, and I stopped with the idea that I would show the ocean to him, which would surely captivate his attention and blow his mind. We were so close that the ocean and waves dumping on the beach were almost all that could be seen out the window. I held him up to take in the sight, but in his squirming state—questioning what new cruelty I was subjecting him to on top of this already-heinous and interminable car ride—he somehow managed to completely fail in ever noticing the ocean. But it was right there in front of him! You can lead a cat to water…

Oh—I should get to the point? A couple weeks back, the post on Spare Capacity mentioned the outsized detrimental impact written language has had. I know. Here I am still using it. But like my cat, I failed to notice what kept filling my field of vision.

Continue reading →

Views: 2847

Atomic Humans

Posted on by
From Wikimedia Commons

Some themes appear to exert a magnetic pull on my attention: I keep coming back to them and often feel like I’m on a treadmill. It’s hard to figure out why: why am I compelled to keep these topics alive? A recent insight ties some of it together.

Years ago, I wrote a post called A Physics-based Diet Plan. The premise is that humans do not create or destroy atoms within their bodies, and that the energetics are too minuscule to register measurable mass–energy conversion. As such, a person’s mass change—as measured on a bathroom scale, for instance—from one day to the next is completely captured by the difference of mass inputs and mass outputs. It’s just atoms in and out.

Now, the human body has many channels for mass loss. Bathroom functions, breathing (net carbon/water loss really adds up!), and perspiration being the main mechanisms. Mass gain is almost entirely through our pie-holes. And entry via that channel is almost always facilitated by a hand delivering food to the mouth under the control of a brain. If you want to lose weight, the directive is simple: eat less and breathe more. In other words: diet and exercise. I know: radical, right? Every successful program for weight loss involves essentially this same advice, in various guises. That’s because it’s just atoms in every single case, at the foundational level. But oh boy, you wouldn’t believe the resistance I get to this framing. Let’s talk about that…

Continue reading →

Views: 2431

Spare Capacity

Posted on by
By BabelStone, from Wikimedia Commons.

Our prized cerebral capabilities at the level of awareness don’t stack up to very much when compared to the vastly-more-numerous-and-amazing capabilities of almost every other aspect of Life. The relatively meager mental capacity we tend to worship is in many ways the slightest addendum whose capabilities are comparatively rather modest. Yes, we have devised ways to lock in small gains and ratchet them into powerful forces, but the process is embarrassingly slow and limited compared to most processes carried out by Life.

The Impressive Base

The overwhelming share of what makes humans amazing operates far beyond mental awareness. Outside the sacred cerebrum, we breathe, circulate blood, digest a diverse menu of food, filter and clean internal fluids, eliminate wastes, heal wounds, coordinate movement, generate the cells for reproduction, build and rebuild ourselves from a cryptic blueprint, and perhaps most impressively solve very thorny open-ended problems of devising antibodies tailored to disable novel pathogens. For all their “massive” brain-power, the average living human would not have the first clue how to devise a functioning, fully-integrated replacement for any of these and thousands more tasks our bodies handle without a thought. Even the best teams in the world wouldn’t be able to pull it off (though would at least have “the first clue,” and in so doing would know it to be beyond their capability).

Now add the cerebrum and a whole suite of additional capabilities emerge—still beyond our awareness. Perhaps most stunning is visual processing. Among other attributes, it’s nearly instantaneous, seamlessly combines vision from two optical instruments, fills in gaps, enjoys excellent color representation, and has extraordinary dynamic range (putting our film/print or electronic cameras/displays to shame; it’s why total solar eclipses can neither be captured nor displayed adequately by technology). Add to this an incredible capacity for auditory processing able to differentiate subtle sounds and comprehend language. What’s easy for a two-year-old still stumps technological implementations. Our brains perform pattern recognition tasks that are light years ahead of what lots of investment and smart people have been able to cobble in crude technological form. Remember the self-driving car hype from about a decade ago? And the fact that captchas work at all is remarkable testimony.

Don’t ask us how we do it—we have no idea. We just know so many things that we can’t articulate or are not even aware of: we take them for granted—as must be the case when literally unaware of the underlying processes.

Unbidden, the Disney Jungle Book tune for “Bare Necessities” slid into my brain in connection to the “spare capacity” title and theme of this post. Maybe I should try a song version sometime…

Continue reading →

Views: 2380

How Much for One Protein?

Posted on by
Proteins are made of party ribbon curled by scissors. Image by CAChamblee via Wikimedia Commons.

Showing my age a bit, a young Chris Rock in a 1988 movie amusingly asks: “How much for one rib?” Given that the crafting of a single protein plays a central role in this post, and ribs are a source of protein, the association was too much for me to pass up in the title.

I’ve pointed out before that our most elaborate inventions absolutely pale in comparison to even the simplest form of Life. Our gizmos can’t self-replicate, heal wounds, feed themselves, stave off pathogens, or self-evolve. Even though both gadgets and Life appear to be based on atoms and the same fundamental interactions, the level of complexity in Life is far beyond our means to create. At best, we bootstrap and copy.

To make the point, we’ll embark on a well-funded thought experiment that is able to assemble the top talent from around the world in a team given one mission: generate the genetic coding that would carry out a specific novel function by way of synthesizing a novel protein specific to that task. We stipulate a novel function that hasn’t arisen in any lifeform, otherwise the open-book (Google-connected) nature of this test would instantly result in “cheating” off a billion-year heritage.

Let’s see how they do.

Continue reading →

Views: 2165

Food Makes Babies

Posted on by
From Boston Public Library via Wikimedia Commons.

Daniel Quinn returned to the theme that “food makes babies” so often in his writings that it would seem he was continually dissatisfied either with the clarity of his case, or with objections people had, or both. I get it. I often return over and over to the same thorny themes, each time thinking I’ll finally nail it. The exercise is as much for improving internal clarity as anything.

Many of the comments following my coverage of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael focused on the food–baby issue. The more recent post on The Story of B dwells on the topic as well, so I figured it would be worth dedicating a post to the matter, trying to covering all the angles.

The statement that increasing food production leads to increases in population touches a nerve for some people, which is what makes it a valuable topic to explore. For some, the statement seems to be an affront to their notion of control. It implies that humans are “no more than” animals, which takes direct aim at our most prized mythology: human supremacism—relating to Ishmael’s second dirty trick: that we “evolved from the slime”—barely tolerated by modernists, but only in a narrow technical sense.

Now, the objections are not without demonstrable legitimacy. In this post, I will start with the basics, point out key objections, then see what we can make of it.

Continue reading →

Views: 3051

The Story of B

Posted on by
Ammonite fossil, by Liez (H Zell), from Wikimedia Commons.

Oh No. Is Do the Math about to get hijacked for another long series about a Daniel Quinn book, like it was for Ishmael?

How about just a really long post?

The Story of B is the second in a series of three books associated with the wise gorilla, Ishmael, and his teachings. Some report “B” as a more powerful book than the first (Ishmael). For me, they sort-of run together, and I have trouble remembering which book focused on which point. That’s part of why I started the project of capturing the Ishmael content, and here do something similar for The Story of B. I figure if it helps me keep the books straight, it will help others, too.

In this post, I sketch the content of the book. I am not tracing much in the way of story elements. I’m not even fully fleshing out the key arguments, but making more of a map so that I or others can more quickly revisit key parts, or get a quick refresher on the entire book’s flow and content. For those who have not read the book, I hope it serves as encouragement to do so.

Continue reading →

Views: 2429