It took eight years (twelve, if you count George senior's tenure), but the Bush family has finally accomplished its grand goal, reinstating American (or at least, Texan) control of the oil business (exploration, extraction, refinement and distribution) in the Middle East. This is the Bush legacy's coup de grâce, its final act, its swan song, its reason to be, the fat lady has finally sung, its time to saddle up and ride into the sunset. This is ambulance humor of course... everything about the Bush epoch is so sad and repulsive... what else can I do? But the real question isn't why the Bush's have done what they have done, they are oil people! The real question, and I find myself looking to pre-war Nazi Germany as comparison, is why we, the general public, the average Joe and Jane, why all of us have willingly, or at least passively, participated in so thoroughly childish and destructive a program?
I was born in Santa Maria, California. This little coastal valley town used to be the epicenter of the oil business in the US (the movie, There Once Was Blood was situated there). Anyway, many of my friend's fathers, (this was the mid 60's), were engineers in the industry and many of them were shipped off to the Middle East to "consult" during the big drilling wave at the time. It was high times for the oil industry. High times for big U.S. oil companies. There was sooooooo much oil in Saudi Arabia and surroundings; to these people, and especially to the big oil families from Ohio, Texas, Nebraska, and California, it must have looked like the boom would never end. But it did. After the U.S. oil industry worked its considerable engineering and logistical magic upon the Saudi oil fields, after the U.S. oil companies had made an obscene amount of money, and established themselves in all practicality, as a de-facto country-within-a-country in which ever country they were, the locals got together, held a powwow, started OPEC and sent us sailing home. Makes sense; its their land, its their oil. Services rendered. Thanks you very much. Good bye.
You would have to look pretty hard to find any one event that has ever made anyone more angry, more embarrassed, has ever more drop-kicked to such an extent, the financial dreams (deserved or not) of a people. These oil families had never experienced anything but boom times. The oil business is a business described by words like wildcat, boom, and gusher. While U.S. interests were there in the middle east, the rather skimpy U.S. fields back home were mostly pumped to exhaustion, so what these families came home to was a new kind of business, a low margin refinement and distribution business; still staggeringly huge mind you, but very much the antithesis of anything that could be ever again be called "wildcat".
Like I have said, these were not the kind of people who do well in a low margin, cost-cutting, management strategy, MBA-styled business. These were Cowboys in the truest sense. These were John Wayne types, with personalities and egos bigger than the ten gallon hats they wore. Depending on your sensibilities, these people either represented the best of American gumption, or what has been derided as the very kronos of the "Ugly American". Putting politics aside, what you are faced with is a proud people not used to loosing, not used to anything but wild unrestricted growth. They were used to printing money, now they would have to work for it.
If ever a stage had been set for the kind of ugly reprisal, reprisal fermented in resentment, stoked by anger, and at the very least, a perception of entitlement, it was personified in the post OPEC American oil family. It should be said that this pathologic frustration, this hubris, was not in itself limited to oil families... the very fabric of U.S. ego had been worn bare as well. Post war euphoria stoked by U.S. triumph on a world stage and by unprecedented economic growth had set the American public up upon a high and teetering pedestal of self worth. That first little OPEC conference did more to dash the new American ego than anything since the dust bowl and market crash of the twenties and thirties.
The Bush family has been actively planning and scheming and organizing to take back the Middle East ever since OPEC was established. Bush senior's rather restrained march across Iraq set the stage. Bush junior broke the bank and went for broke, spinning the Twin Towers tragedy to great effect to initiate a plan set to writing almost thirty years earlier. Ego-bruised as we were by our national and cultural failings in Korea and Vietnam, the moral reckoning that was the civil rights revolution, the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, and the establishment of OPEC, well we just pony-ed up and rode right along for the Bush Crusades.
Today's New York Times article "Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back" (Andrew E. Kramer, June 19, 2008) has confirmed the theory I have been working on for 20 years. Of course everything we are doing in the middle east is about oil, but more importantly, it is about the dashed ego of an overly proud people who have had to face, kicking and screaming, a mortality that has felt, well, down right un-American. Though the Bush Crusade was enacted on a global scale and paid for with obscene amounts of public moneys (and lives), we, the average citizens, who will not benefit from its spoils, who will pay dearly for the international loans and U.S. bonds that will eventually fund it, we the un-rich, the gas buying public, have fought right along side the rich cowboy wildcat oil families as though it was our own fortunes to be won or lost.
The overwrought nationalist pride (some call it patriotism) that we collective catharse as a tendency to tantrum has almost ruined us as a people and as an economy, has greatly eroded the moral foundation of the U.S. as democratic example. Along the way, we have abandoned, one by one, many of the radically moral tenants upon which this first truly modern nation was established. Our childish reaction to a world rapidly becoming level, to a world of nations as equal competitors has so scared us that we seem eager to forget the little things like fairness, patience, equality, majority as protector of the minority, rule of law, policy as standard barer, being a global example, benevolence, triumph through hard work and productivity, that were and are the only difference between first world productivity and poverty and chaos. We have been so angry that we have slowly replaced these higher goals with simple greed and lynch-mob like retribution. Moral righteousness traded in for a quick fix of angry indignation.
So how do you feel? Better? Was it worth it? Can we forgive ourselves. Can we apologize to the world, and move forward as good people? Will we be able to repair our status as true leaders? Have we learned the difference between what feels good and what builds a better future? Is our national tantrum over yet?
Randall
Mapping Biological Sentience is More Important than Mapping Biological Sentience
Why should we seek a definition of the process that is mind? Knowledge exposes paths to action. By eliminating rhetoric and superstition, measurement-derived knowledge unleashes entire epochs of human productivity. In the same way that Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton produced observation-backed theories that crushed centuries of ignorance-born superstitions, replacing them with the maths that allowed accurate predictions of seasons, daylight, tides, line of site, perspective, the motion of objects (momentum, weight, acceleration), we are poised to transcend the ignorant rhetoric that blinds us from a true understanding of the mind, to understand the mechanism of "understanding" itself.
When culture finally abandons ideas based on desire and fear and replaces them with measurement based truths, it trades in the outrageous for the merely complex. Through painstaking experimentation, chemistry's knowledge-based practicality rapidly outgrew alchemy's dreamy greed. Armed with a growing repertoire of elements and the over arching rules that gave them predictable behaviors and attributes, scientists, doctors, and industrialists, gifted society with unheard of wealth and welfare, doubling or tripling life expectancy in less than a century and a half. Though it came in an unexpected form, the riches that drove the alchemists became a reality through the practicality of knowledge. Along the way we learned about energy and forces and these understandings built a solid base for relativity and quantum mechanics which in their own way exposed real (if impractical) solutions to the alchemist's dreams. Yes, it turns out, you can turn lead into gold, but it will cost far more than digging the stuff (pre-made) out of mountains. Mostly though, we discovered once again how self limiting desire is when it comes without knowledge. No simple belief-based recipe would ever have allowed anyone in a pointy hat to accomplish the transmutation of matter that arises only from the immense energies within a collapsing star or at the business end of a particle accelerator drawing trillions of volts off the power grid. In our own day, we find our selves face to face with the wall that stands between our present ignorance of mind, and a knowledge-based understanding of how biology has built a symbolic abstraction machine... a brain... and how it works.
Measurement-based understandings of the brain will expose huge areas of understanding that we can scarcely imagine. We are fond of saying we live in the information age, but the truth is that we barely understand it. Yes, it is probably true that the brain is but one of a billion ways to build a thinking machine, but it is good place to start knowing, it works, and it's right hear on top each of our shoulders. Aside from our premature and rather alchemist-like attempts to build our own thinking machines, the human brain is the only sentience machine we've go to study, so lets get down to the task of measurement. If history is any indication, the useful understandings we gain will far exceed any present ability to predict... and the benefits we reap to will far exceed the limited and dreamy goals of self understanding and emotional transcendence that motivate the alchemists that crowd the study of the brain. What will we be able to do with a general understanding of the machinery of thought and mind? Only then will we begin to build evolutionary caldrons that evolve mind-stuff and do so purposefully.
Biology came upon sentience and mind late in the evolutionary day. Mind is a by-product of biology. Biology doesn't do mind but as a side effect of billions of years of accident. If we were instead, to design, from knowledge, a system especially suited to the evolution of mind, could we not unleash an evolutionary explosion that would do for the acceleration of mind what biology did for metabolism? We are simply not smart enough to think about thinking that is millions of times more effective or efficient than our own. Biology has built into our brains the ability to learn. But a life of learning represents a treasure trove of complexity that is simply not transferable to the next generation. Dare we imagine beyond biology, to a system that "genetically" adjusts at the pace of experience and learning... allowing continuous knowledge weighted evolution... a brain that evolves the ability to evolve in response to the complexity and pattern it perfects through time?
The out-fall of a system purposely designed to evolve towards complexity handling... designed towards the self optimization of complexity-maximizing machinery... born of an actual understanding why evolution is, and by extension, what complexity is... will certainly engender fold increases in evolutionary pace. Of blindness and stupidity and an almost inexhaustible reservoir of time and energy, biology evolved the sentience necessary to understand and quantify complexity and its use to reduce order... biology evolved the human brain. As the recipients of this gift of long time and deep energy, with this machinery to understand the largest process, the process that resulted in this brain of ours, we are obligated by the process that built us to hand the baton of evolution to the next paradigm of evolution, and that means building the next paradigm, (the way chemistry built biology, the way biology built sentience).
Understanding our own complexity, understanding the brain and sentience, is a potent way to maximize our potential to build towards the future of evolutionary process. Knowing the present edge of complexity allows a system to better build towards greater complexity. Understanding the brain and mind, understanding biology's valiant attempt to build a universal symbol processing machine is not the only path forward, but it is one of the most potent and fruitful paths towards understanding and generalizing abstraction, language, and evolution itself. The rewards of such an endeavor be immeasurable and unpredictable. That is the way of evolution. We must choose those areas of research that will have the greatest potential to influence the greatest influencers. Complexity handling, the ability of a system to build, contain and refine an internal representation of the most causal influences in the universe in which it resides, will have a greater influence on its ability to influence or shape the influencers of the future, than any other ability. To understand finally, our potential, our responsibility, our place in process, is a proud and unique moment in evolution.
Randall Reetz
When culture finally abandons ideas based on desire and fear and replaces them with measurement based truths, it trades in the outrageous for the merely complex. Through painstaking experimentation, chemistry's knowledge-based practicality rapidly outgrew alchemy's dreamy greed. Armed with a growing repertoire of elements and the over arching rules that gave them predictable behaviors and attributes, scientists, doctors, and industrialists, gifted society with unheard of wealth and welfare, doubling or tripling life expectancy in less than a century and a half. Though it came in an unexpected form, the riches that drove the alchemists became a reality through the practicality of knowledge. Along the way we learned about energy and forces and these understandings built a solid base for relativity and quantum mechanics which in their own way exposed real (if impractical) solutions to the alchemist's dreams. Yes, it turns out, you can turn lead into gold, but it will cost far more than digging the stuff (pre-made) out of mountains. Mostly though, we discovered once again how self limiting desire is when it comes without knowledge. No simple belief-based recipe would ever have allowed anyone in a pointy hat to accomplish the transmutation of matter that arises only from the immense energies within a collapsing star or at the business end of a particle accelerator drawing trillions of volts off the power grid. In our own day, we find our selves face to face with the wall that stands between our present ignorance of mind, and a knowledge-based understanding of how biology has built a symbolic abstraction machine... a brain... and how it works.
Measurement-based understandings of the brain will expose huge areas of understanding that we can scarcely imagine. We are fond of saying we live in the information age, but the truth is that we barely understand it. Yes, it is probably true that the brain is but one of a billion ways to build a thinking machine, but it is good place to start knowing, it works, and it's right hear on top each of our shoulders. Aside from our premature and rather alchemist-like attempts to build our own thinking machines, the human brain is the only sentience machine we've go to study, so lets get down to the task of measurement. If history is any indication, the useful understandings we gain will far exceed any present ability to predict... and the benefits we reap to will far exceed the limited and dreamy goals of self understanding and emotional transcendence that motivate the alchemists that crowd the study of the brain. What will we be able to do with a general understanding of the machinery of thought and mind? Only then will we begin to build evolutionary caldrons that evolve mind-stuff and do so purposefully.
Biology came upon sentience and mind late in the evolutionary day. Mind is a by-product of biology. Biology doesn't do mind but as a side effect of billions of years of accident. If we were instead, to design, from knowledge, a system especially suited to the evolution of mind, could we not unleash an evolutionary explosion that would do for the acceleration of mind what biology did for metabolism? We are simply not smart enough to think about thinking that is millions of times more effective or efficient than our own. Biology has built into our brains the ability to learn. But a life of learning represents a treasure trove of complexity that is simply not transferable to the next generation. Dare we imagine beyond biology, to a system that "genetically" adjusts at the pace of experience and learning... allowing continuous knowledge weighted evolution... a brain that evolves the ability to evolve in response to the complexity and pattern it perfects through time?
The out-fall of a system purposely designed to evolve towards complexity handling... designed towards the self optimization of complexity-maximizing machinery... born of an actual understanding why evolution is, and by extension, what complexity is... will certainly engender fold increases in evolutionary pace. Of blindness and stupidity and an almost inexhaustible reservoir of time and energy, biology evolved the sentience necessary to understand and quantify complexity and its use to reduce order... biology evolved the human brain. As the recipients of this gift of long time and deep energy, with this machinery to understand the largest process, the process that resulted in this brain of ours, we are obligated by the process that built us to hand the baton of evolution to the next paradigm of evolution, and that means building the next paradigm, (the way chemistry built biology, the way biology built sentience).
Understanding our own complexity, understanding the brain and sentience, is a potent way to maximize our potential to build towards the future of evolutionary process. Knowing the present edge of complexity allows a system to better build towards greater complexity. Understanding the brain and mind, understanding biology's valiant attempt to build a universal symbol processing machine is not the only path forward, but it is one of the most potent and fruitful paths towards understanding and generalizing abstraction, language, and evolution itself. The rewards of such an endeavor be immeasurable and unpredictable. That is the way of evolution. We must choose those areas of research that will have the greatest potential to influence the greatest influencers. Complexity handling, the ability of a system to build, contain and refine an internal representation of the most causal influences in the universe in which it resides, will have a greater influence on its ability to influence or shape the influencers of the future, than any other ability. To understand finally, our potential, our responsibility, our place in process, is a proud and unique moment in evolution.
Randall Reetz
How the Brain Works (no more kid gloves!)
Proposal For A Structural and Electrical Conductance Map Of The Brain At The Neuron Scale
Randall Reetz 8/28/01
Goal: To produce (through direct measurement) a digital multidimensional data set (and simulation models) of the human brain capturing sufficient structure and behavioral information (dendrite scale) to accurately derive a robust specification of it's function.
Intro: For hundreds (perhaps thousands) of years, we have wondered what mechanisms drive thinking and the self. Certainly the most complex organ in our bodies, the brain is understandably the least understood organ as well. However, I contend that complexity is not the only hurdle standing between us an understanding of the brain's function and the mechanisms that precipitate function. I believe we have a species-wide (maybe even bio-wide) bias against knowing how knowing works. Is it possible that we are afraid to know what knowing actually is? It is way past time to gather our balls and pull back the terrible curtains hanging between us and this most forbidden Wizard of Oz. In computers we have a modeling medium robust enough to handle the complexity of n-dimentional causal networks. If we apply modern nano-scale scanning techniques to the measurement of the brain at resolutions sufficient to capture relevant structural data (maybe 1 50th the width of a dendrite) and simultaneously augment this 3D data with simultaneously acquired, spectral/chemical and electrical conductance data, then we can begin to build and refine empirically derived functional simulations. We will finely know how the brain works (or at the very least, how it doesn't work)! Time to take the kid-gloves off. Its time to stop talking and philosophizing in the dark. We have all of the tools, technologies, methods, and knowledges we need to illuminate this one great darkness in human knowledge. Its time to shut up and start measuring.
Method: Nano-scale cryo
A. Suspend head and neck (in natural attitude) in electrically neutral medium that will cure into semisolid.
B. Cryogenically freeze suspended head (block) at liquid Nitrogen temperatures.
C. In nano-scale steps... 1. Shave surface of block (in steps of 1/50th diameter of dendrite). 2. Scan surface revealed by each shaving (at resolution of 1/50th diameter of dendrite) with the following detectors... a. Optically at range from infrared through visible light and into the ultraviolet range. b. For Electrical Conductance by dragging a nano-scale probe along surface scanning both surface measurements of conductance with detection plate (covering entire surface of shave) and through magnetic inductance scan at depth. c. Spectral analysis of optical scans for elemental makeup.
D. Run raw scan data set through software filters designed to reduce it to functional and structural maps.
E. Run functional map data sets through software designed to reduce it to computational logic.
F. Run sensory data through computational logic maps to produce input/output sets.
G. Analyze input/output sets do derive description of brain function and methods.
Randall Reetz
Randall Reetz 8/28/01
Goal: To produce (through direct measurement) a digital multidimensional data set (and simulation models) of the human brain capturing sufficient structure and behavioral information (dendrite scale) to accurately derive a robust specification of it's function.
Intro: For hundreds (perhaps thousands) of years, we have wondered what mechanisms drive thinking and the self. Certainly the most complex organ in our bodies, the brain is understandably the least understood organ as well. However, I contend that complexity is not the only hurdle standing between us an understanding of the brain's function and the mechanisms that precipitate function. I believe we have a species-wide (maybe even bio-wide) bias against knowing how knowing works. Is it possible that we are afraid to know what knowing actually is? It is way past time to gather our balls and pull back the terrible curtains hanging between us and this most forbidden Wizard of Oz. In computers we have a modeling medium robust enough to handle the complexity of n-dimentional causal networks. If we apply modern nano-scale scanning techniques to the measurement of the brain at resolutions sufficient to capture relevant structural data (maybe 1 50th the width of a dendrite) and simultaneously augment this 3D data with simultaneously acquired, spectral/chemical and electrical conductance data, then we can begin to build and refine empirically derived functional simulations. We will finely know how the brain works (or at the very least, how it doesn't work)! Time to take the kid-gloves off. Its time to stop talking and philosophizing in the dark. We have all of the tools, technologies, methods, and knowledges we need to illuminate this one great darkness in human knowledge. Its time to shut up and start measuring.
Method: Nano-scale cryo
A. Suspend head and neck (in natural attitude) in electrically neutral medium that will cure into semisolid.
B. Cryogenically freeze suspended head (block) at liquid Nitrogen temperatures.
C. In nano-scale steps... 1. Shave surface of block (in steps of 1/50th diameter of dendrite). 2. Scan surface revealed by each shaving (at resolution of 1/50th diameter of dendrite) with the following detectors... a. Optically at range from infrared through visible light and into the ultraviolet range. b. For Electrical Conductance by dragging a nano-scale probe along surface scanning both surface measurements of conductance with detection plate (covering entire surface of shave) and through magnetic inductance scan at depth. c. Spectral analysis of optical scans for elemental makeup.
D. Run raw scan data set through software filters designed to reduce it to functional and structural maps.
E. Run functional map data sets through software designed to reduce it to computational logic.
F. Run sensory data through computational logic maps to produce input/output sets.
G. Analyze input/output sets do derive description of brain function and methods.
Randall Reetz
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