The poet drowns in a blurred surface

The poet drowns in a blurred surface
Painted to look like water
The painter has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt
That 3/4th of an inch is repugnant to the nature of his bread crumbs.
All he has are crumbs and he feasts on them
Smaller and smaller, emaciated, he can’t find the right amount of blurriness.
He fails because thinks blurriness 
is an amount
He read Plato when his bread crumbs were bigger,
How he says likeness and difference are relationships between the same two things
Even though they are opposites
He wants there to be a degree for likeness and difference
So that he can ignore how little sense there is in the world
Therefore, beyond a shadow of a doubt,
He can never finish his painting.
Maybe 1/4 of an inch is a small enough crumb to stop.

The Naive and the Mature is didactic in a useful way. The main barrier to intellectual growth is the idea of intellectual progress. Many people, for example, consider Zeno’s paradoxes to be solved by Calculus. One philosopher, the author of the book Zeno’s Paradoxes, considers these many people to be quite far from a good understanding of both Calculus and Zeno’s paradoxes. And children can sometimes come up with Zeno’s questions (they are only paradoxes to the mathematician, For Zeno, they are merely questions put to the mathematicians because they reduce a mathematician’s beliefs into absurdity/paradox.) Children would probably never come up with Calculus. There is a certain attitude of naiveté required to reject the very mature and also dishonest representations of movement and the whole/part relationship taught in a standard Calculus class in college.

Someone who is a pedant will naturally follow the pressure to assent to the representations of Calculus. I remember reading about how one math learner was “helped” to believe in the Axiom of Completeness, even though he was a smart math student studying advanced math, he was having a crisis of faith and needed to be “helped” not because he didn’t understand, but because he wanted to disagree with this axiom. This is how a normal Calculus class is dishonest. Disagreement isn’t really allowed.

There is a strange interplay between naivete and mature thought that is required to attain understanding in mathematics. So I can look at the idea of a limit, or the version of likeness used to build our number systems (equality), and if I criticize these ideas, I can be accused of being naive. In the face mathematical complexity and exactitude, its formal structure and its teachers with fancy salaries and forceful minds, all this pretension about mathematics is actually not complex. The pretense of mathematical complexity is as simple and naive as a simple question in critique of mathematics.

In my research I discovered some significant statistical results that students have an easier time learning logic when they are given alternative logics to compare with Aristotle’s logic. Learning Aristotle’s logic is not the point, or we would follow these results and start teaching alternatives to help them understand Aristotle’s logic. The point is assent, control, and to prevent too many people from having a different mind about things. That is why Aristotle’s logic has to be the only one taught. (even though probability is another fuzzy logic, and statistics follows another logic to reject null hypotheses.) These are labeled “theories” instead of logic, to prevent the inevitable dissonance with the message that there is only one kind of deductive logic.

The skeptic attitude is to learn everything about a certain subject, and then to decide that belief in these theories is too rash a decision. A skeptic, after 20 years of learning mathematics, has to reject it in the end, out of a sense of honesty.

It does take naivete to really see the troubles with mathematics. It requires that you trust yourself and can suspend all your learning to look at a simple idea in mathematics, such as a graph representing mathematics discontinuity or continuity. I would offer that this naive attitude is essential for learning, and anyone who stops learning because they know so much, doesn’t know anything.

Mathematical learning is the most forceful subject for conditioning people out of the skeptical attitude. So I have a written a dissertation on mathematics, and am accused of being naive when after all my education, I reject almost all of mathematical constructions. Not because disbelieving in mathematics is simple: skepticism about mathematics is most certainly a more complex attitude to take after so much learning on the subject. But in a way the pedants are right, I do take the air of the Socratic interrogator, and I daresay that attitude is less naive than acceptance of mathematics.

Full disclosure: I failed my Calculus I class twice, even though I learned some of it in high school, but went on to get an A in Calculus II, and a B+ in the easier Calculus III. Then I learned analysis over and over again. I never passed Calculus I, even though I have taught the subject to students many times.

And the Demons where Hunger and Cold

And a serpentine lake makes the waves look like coils
The churning makes foam and a powerful wind
That blows us away from the lumbering gait
Of an elephant shining a wishing-well-soul

That that spray keeps us high
That brash music keeps fate
That the Kingdom is Thunder and Gold

Making distinction between machine and human is quite difficult. We are human and not machine only by a hair. If a human fails to notice this hair he is basically a machine… The etymology of the word robot is instructive. Even though etymology is almost entirely a work of the imagination, according to this imagination, the word robot traces back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word orbh (source: etymonline.com where orbh is also related to “work” and “slave”), related to the PIE Orbho which means orphan or more accurately “One without a father.” So if I may speculate a meaning from this… (it would be preferable to put this in verse to give it a hypothetical air): Someone fathers an automatic translator, and then the father goes away. His child is the technology of google translate. This child doesn’t know any more than what his father taught him. He can only be a servant, or slave. If the father places his benevolence within his child, then the child can grow and learn new techniques. He is not a robot. Now, who is your father? Christianity has a good answer to that. The Buddhist answer is similar. And the Buddha elaborates:

(Reference: SN 23.2)

Now, a robot has a physical body. It can perceive things with instruments that detect light or sound, etc. then it has an algorithm for its feelings or reactions to its senses. This means that it can generally recognize when it is time to laugh or cry and behave appropriately. Arguably, it has free will, because it has access to random numbers. (the random numbers a computer has access to are sort of pseudo-random, this is debatable). With access to random numbers it can make different decisions depending on when you ask it to do its task. (the “seed” used to make random numbers is usually made by using an extremely precise measurement of the present time, called “machine time”) The only thing missing is complete consciousness. It may have some partial consciousness if it is sufficiently complex…

However, can a robot feel wonder or amazement? This part of consciousness seems to be missing from a robot. Is there a sense of wonder when the slave does its work? The Buddha had an analysis of questions, the 4th category of questions are the big questions that are so big they are useless. A robot would never ask these questions because it would be of no use as a servant. Would we ever want to create a robot that can experience wonder? It would probably result in the robot doing work less well. On not working I have this to offer. Maybe a robot is wondering when it enters a calculation loop that is not terminable, but this would be against our own desires of what a robot ought to be.

This is my main entry into the teachings I have read about Buddhism, although there are teachings that allow extreme wonder about the mountains and trees, ocean and sand: about the physical senses. As my meditation teacher says, sometimes the practice involves looking at the world like a baby. The next step is wonder; wonder is how a baby begins.

The right amount of wonder should be “middle.” I do not mean an opening to all mysteries at once. The middle way is a difficult concept to pin down. The middle way is not the same as having a mediocre feeling. The goal of practice is extreme bliss. We would never get extreme bliss if we practiced a mediocre feeling all day. Same with the amount of wonder we may have… It would be better to leave some mystery to the concept of wonder.

An interesting mathematical example (similar to an example found in many math textbooks at the graduate level) of how difficult it is to seek the middle is the set of numbers I will describe to you now. Starting with on an xy cartesian plane, Place a point at y=1/2 and x=1/2, this point is the middle of the interval from x=0 to x=1. Then we continue to find middles between x=0 and x=1/2, and between x=1/2 and x=1. These middles are found with two new points having y=1/4 and the x-coordinates are x=1/4 and x=3/4. If we continue this process of finding middles, there will be so many points near y=0, along the x-axis, that it is arguably continuous. However there are many many discrete points as well. It is arguably between continuous and discrete. This shows the difficulty of finding the middle.

And that middle is sometimes big and sometimes small, and sometimes it is something “off the continuum” (Ref Thannisaro Bikkhu 2012 ), depending on the relevant dichotomies, even the dichotomies of relevance and irrelevance.

Part of wondering is unlearning, as the ancients cherished “learned ignorance.” A robot can’t unlearn with its available faculties.

What is wonder, anyway? Why are we taught that wonder is anxiety? It can be a beautiful conscious state to be in. And why should we try to reduce our sense of wonder with scientific posturing and rhetoric about knowing so much (some of the things we consider knowledge can be the result of pessimism– such as the mathematical definition of the continuum.)

I believe this wonder is part of a poet’s work and part of a human translator’s work on poetry. This wonder of a human hand in working is conveyed to the readers, who experience something that is entirely human.

May this piece gladden good folk.

Rags are indecent, and there is no shame in covering with what you have. Maybe it is mean for the beggar to beg, as a poet begs for his words, and a man begs for a bride. A woman will say no to the haggard emaciated beggars: Those hanging around the temple of the Green Buddha hoping for a hand out. The Green Buddha, who all clamber to, offering food and a home. Yet He will not eat except what will stave off death for a day, and even in the temple given to him, he knows his homelessness. The beggars, his disciples, where is the difference? Because everyone will learn. And who will be His bride? We are all Buddhas, you would know it if you would let the prophets speak. The ladles of immortality that the House of the West offer are empty. We clothe ourselves in fine ideas that are transparent, and the finer our idea, the more naked and indecent we are. The Emperor has no clothes, and has many women. Get on your knees and believe: There is one and only one woven cloth with which all the worlds of dreams and hardships, queens and beggars clothe themselves. Only this cloth is real, we try to fill it, but in the end we must give the cloth away.

I have been taking an anti-psychotic for many years that made me feel really awful and angry. I learned to kind of be “in it” and handle the bad feeling without much thought or outward sign. Eventually this bad feeling was my neutral or natural state, and as long as I kept it in mind, I could get through it pretty well. But sensitive people could feel the bad feeling I was getting from the drug. About a year ago I was “upgraded” to severe depression instead of my old and derogatory diagnosis. They changed my medication to something that amplifies anti-depressants, and suddenly this bad feeling is gone.

And every plant and animal has a star

We have an idea that space follows the same rules that Earth follows.

This idea is called the inductive inference.

But as Hume pointed out, the inductive inference is just the imagination at work.

There is no deductive reason to believe outerspace follows the same spacial rules as the Earth.

Because of this, if we ever meet a star in person, or a gas cloud, or the fanciful black hole, it may turn out that it is quite different from what we imagine.

Meaning makes life full, as I am sure many people agree. And what does meaning mean? This question poses some difficulty. Herbert Mead believed the word meaningful was meaningless. Quine mentioned that linguists that specialize in meaning “are in the position of not knowing what it is they are talking about.”

What meaning means is a fundamental and foundational question. Meaning is about sense too. When we cry because a lotus flower is too perfect, that means something. When we pay our taxes, maybe it means something to people we don’t know, but for us we often feel busyness, loss, and frustration. So we can feel a meaning, also as Kant offered more recently than most that reason (or sense) is a passion, being backed by many much older thinkers. And meaning is not just sense. Jokes can be funny in a meaningless way, such as in using derogatory words frivolously. My father believed that tragedy meant more than comedy. Comedy seemed to him rather pointless because continuity doesn’t weigh as much to the mind as a tragic end. One time he wrote a humorous essay about fatherhood. He had me read it before publishing, and he saw me laughing. He asked me “why is it funny?” He really was asking; he didn’t know. So I told him “because it is so sad.” We tend to seek the grain of sadness or fear in levity, but not the tiny bubble of enjoyment and happiness in a satisfying tragedy. The bubble gone unnoticed makes it all the more enjoyable.

Sometimes when we mean something, we are pointing at a gold coin, and we mean the gold coin. The coin has weight and a quality of being pure. That is part of what we mean. Sometimes someone dies and we ask for meaning. In that case we don’t intend a “what” like a gold coin, but a “why”. What and why mean things, “when” can mean something: such as when the sun is eclipsed or the clock strikes 3:33. “Where” is meaningful: at the top of a mountain or at the temple. Who could be a famous news anchor, or a mother’s lullaby. How is meaningful: if we make the cake from scratch, and grow, harvest and grind the grain for flower. Nowadays there is a glut of appreciating the work of how, and the techniques for proving a mathematical theorem or how a gun was turned into a piece of metal sculpture.

Maybe the question we should ask is who doesn’t have meaning, when, where, what doesn’t have meaning and why?

Enter logical positivism, the most meaningless philosophy. The only idea in logical positivism is a vague idea of the good, and how we “just know what it is” without any intellectual activity. We can be busy assembling the parts of a car on a conveyor belt and be content in our concentration about mechanical things because of our idea we are doing good or valuable work. And this lukewarm heart we have while we do it is the only meaning of our work, generally ignored because we are too busy to notice our hearts.

The engineers have an appreciation for how, but the assembly workers, when they are not thinking like an engineer, are in about as meaningless and unobserved a mode as possible for a human being.

But sometimes we don’t have time to think about the soldiers that died for our land and culture, so I can sit at the ramen store and have a distinct cultural experience. We don’t have time to consider how the pig died to give us a succulent piece of its body to eat from our ramen bowl. Meaninglessness seems necessary for survival in our world where children die in factories so we can have nice cheap shoes. And maybe it always has been so, where we walk past the wretched human sufferer on the street with only a pithy stab of pity.

And to any family who has lost a daughter or a son… should we carry the conscience and the meanings of that death everywhere and constantly?

It seems like meaninglessness could be a moment of happiness in an otherwise tragic life. We throw off our chains of poverty and disease, loss and hardship, and look up at the open bright sky and feel happy for no reason at all, senselessly. Why should meaninglessness be so bad? Is that moment of happiness careless and wrong? Or is it the very purpose of life?

And a poem that conveys this senseless happiness, is it not real poetry because it is meaningless?

Once upon a time there was a grasshopper that just sat around and breathed in the thick summer air all day and night. He would eat green leaves that were everywhere, more than anyone could eat. He sat and sat, until the ant, who was sweating and carrying heavy food to his anthill, got angry. He said “Grasshopper! you fool, you are not going to have anything when winter comes” The grasshopper looked at the ant and smiled. “Come here friend, I have things to tell about breathing air and eating grass.” but the ant wasn’t listening, he kept working and working all summer long. Finally the fall came, and the air was cold, and the grasshopper ran out of food. He didn’t move much, except to hop gently when the whim came to him. He didn’t cry for the cold, and he had the same smile he had in the summer. Finally the snow and icy winds came. The ant sat in his anthill with his wife and children. Sometimes he thought about that foolish grasshopper, but most of the time he was working to raise his kids. The winters and summer went by, and other grasshoppers came and went. Those grasshoppers were different, but sometimes there was one grasshopper that acted like the first foolish grasshopper. Once his son began to listen to a grasshopper and never returned to the anthill. Finally one winter, the ant was old and he began to fear death. He thought about all his work, and wondered how he could bring his food or his children or wife with him after death. These were evil thoughts, but eventually he remembered that foolish grasshopper. He thought about how the grasshopper smiled even in the cold of the fall, and it made the ant smile a little too. He did nothing and sat just breathing and eating the food he had stored over the years. In the end, he wished he had had a whole summer to breathe and eat and learn to smile, but his time was over, and he died.

The idea that thoughts are hypothetical is partially true. You can have a thought and have it not be real in one sense, but in another the thought has physical causes and physical effects. Certainly, atom-splitting wouldn’t happen much on the Earth’s crust without humans having the idea of it first. That is one physical effect of an idea. The cause of the idea of splitting the atom came from other physical things, such as the physical reality of Word War II. The other cause of this idea was other thoughts that had come before. Where did those ideas come from? Certainly not from just one mind. The ideas were hanging in the funk between scientists in sweaty stressed out bodies. Bodies that wanted respect, dignity, sex, food and so many other things that brought out their thinking work. After the physical causes, when a thought happens, it effects the brain and usually other parts of the body immediately.

The quote about thinking I like most is “The trick [to thinking hard], Berty boy, is not minding that it hurts”. Thinking hurts. It taxes the body. Even pleasurable thinking hurts, much like other pleasurable bodily things hurt. When you eat, the body has a lot of work to do. Same with sex, playing sports, or any recognizable activity, pleasurable or not. The belief that thinking all the time will make you happy, either through positive thinking, or by the idea that life is a game of strategy that we could win by becoming rich or famous, does not have much truth in it. Even though the scientists that built the atom bomb “won” and got rewards for their bodies, the effect was generally a loss to society. Maybe there is less discomfort for many people as a result of winning the war, but the result of atom-splitting becoming a serviceable thought is mainly a whole lot of stress and worry about subsequent applications of the idea of the atom bomb. It is possible to think your way out of thinking, but it is the hardest thing to do with thinking. The most successful works of language do just that, like the song of a Tibetan singing bowl, they are sounds that cause silence.

The idea that we should think a lot in education is a large drain on everyone in the form of stress and worry. Believing this stress and worry is just a fantasy is not a respectable position. Worry is a negative feedback loop, though. Stressful thoughts conceive more stressful (often unnecessary) thinking. It can be counteracted with mental effort, but none of this is fantasy. Stressful thinking has immediate physical presence in the body, and long term physical causes and effects. We have this stress anyway, because when there are other forms of suffering and hardship, we feel the need to think it through. There is nothing bad about the kind of thinking that takes you through hardship. One of the bad effects of other unnecessary stressful thinking is that the stressful thinking that is good for handling hardship of humans gets pushed to the side.

People in America tend to think listening to the life stories of other people is a favor we do for them. It is true it is stressful thinking, but this is the kind of thinking that really helps everyone. Learning algebra is stressful thinking that is rarely applied by most of the individual minds that do the learning. For some reason we believe the human being next to us and their life story is less important than algebra, or less important than the political narrative pushed with oppressive sameness on 100 different news channels. This is a loss to society.

Some people just don’t think that much, and there is something bad about that. Thinking through the things that make us unhappy is very effective, as any therapist will tell you. Once we’re happy though, the goal is to leave thinking behind for as long as possible.