To Be Human Is To Be Hopeful.

Dr. Leonard L. Bailey elicited admiration and outrage by transplanting the heart of a baboon into dying infant Stephanie Fae Beauclair in 1984 (Bailey died on May 12 at his home in Redlands, Calif, from cancer. He was 76).

Dr. Bailey went on to pioneer human heart transplants for infants, and to build a renowned center for children’s cardiac surgery at Loma Linda University in Southern California. The next year, Dr. Bailey performed the first successful heart transplant in an infant, from a human donor. He went on to perform 375 more children heart transplants over the course of his career, as well as other types of pediatric heart surgery. He continued operating until 2017.

Stephanie had a fatal birth defect, hypoplastic left heart syndrome, in which the main pumping chamber of the heart does not develop. She was quickly transferred to Loma Linda.

At the time, babies with the condition lived only a few weeks, at most. Surgery to try to repair the defect had poor results. Two infant heart transplants involving other patients had been tried at other hospitals, and failed.

“I knew she was going to die, and I had to try,” Ms. Beauclair said in a telephone interview. “If I hadn’t tried, I always would have wondered, could we have saved her? Until you’re faced with that, you don’t know what you’ll do.”Dr. Bailey emphasized that the operation would be highly experimental.

“But somebody has to be first somewhere at some point,” said Stephanie’s mom.

We hoped, therefore we are. Life is hope.

Dr. Bailey had six young baboons, and he conducted various tests to identify one with tissue that seemed most immunologically compatible with Stephanie’s. But the animals’ blood type did not match the infant’s — something that Dr. Bailey later called “a tactical error with catastrophic consequences.”

***

New York Times:

The operation took place on Oct. 26, 1984. At first, Stephanie seemed to thrive. During a news conference at the hospital, Dr. Bailey was ebullient, describing her as a “beautiful, healthy baby” whose transplanted heart was doing “everything it should.”

Animal rights groups said killing the baboon was immoral and held demonstrations outside the hospital and Dr. Bailey’s home. He and the hospital received threats.

“This wasn’t a wild whim,” Dr. Roger Hadley, dean of Loma Linda University School of Medicine, said in an interview. “He had worked for years on doing cross-species transplants in animals. We had a whole lab of animals who had somebody else’s heart.”

Dr. Hadley added that the hospital at Loma Linda is faith-based — the hospital and the university are run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church — and said that all its ethicists and theologians had thought that the transplant was the right thing to do.

“We stood by him here,” he said.

By the time Baby Fae came along, it was abundantly clear that transplants could save lives, especially with the use of cyclosporine, a powerful anti-rejection drug that had recently become available. But organ donors were in short supply. Long before Baby Fae, a surgeon had transplanted a chimpanzee heart into a person; the transplant failed. Other surgeons had experimented with transplanting kidneys from chimpanzees into humans. The longest surviving recipient lived nine months, and was well enough to go back to work.

Stephanie’s initial rally after the surgery did not last. Rejection and organ failure set in, and she died on Nov. 15, 1984. She had survived for 21 days.

***

Dr. Bailey had to try, because, in his well-considered, highest professional opinion, there was some hope. Trans-specific grafts, if they were made to work much better, could save, or improve, millions of lives.

There is no other way to learn something about what is truly unknown, besides trying.

The only way to defend the noblest, best, most altruistic human values is to have the courage and ability of enabling them to come alive with acts and facts. Respect and gratitude for the courage of all concerned. Especially to baby Stephanie, who became a hero of humanity, too.

All other grafts spectacularly failed too. Many have now become standard.

***

“To be hopeful is to be human.” Does that mean that those without hope are inhuman?

Not exactly, in the full sense of “inhuman”. But inhuman enough to get quite depressed, and often depressed enough to engage in violent acts, for example against themselves.

When our distant ancestors went down those trees, and explored the savannah, they were hopeful. Hope: we won’t even exist without it.

Patrice Ayme

LOGIC IS MATERIAL

Logic doesn’t just matter, it is matter.

FUNDAMENTAL PROCESSES, INCLUDING COMPUTATIONS, LOGIC, ARE MATERIAL OBJECTS:

Is there something besides matter? No. What is matter? Ah, two types of things, corresponding to wave-particle duality… Or, as I put it often, process-quanta duality.

***

We should have come a long way in 24 centuries, yet some keep repeating ideas of Plato, an Athenian plutocrat. Plato (and his teacher Socrates and student Aristotle) had an extreme right wing agenda, much of it pursued later as the “Hellenistic” regimes (dictatorships), imperial fascist Roman Principate, and the rage against innovation. Plato’s metaphysics has much in common, if not everything, with Christianism (this explains its survival…)

And now for a word from this essay’s sponsor, the gentleman contradicting me. Robin Herbert replied to me: …”many don’t seem to grasp that the classical logics are not tied to any physical assumptions… the classical logics are not tied to any physical assumptions. I think the problem is that we have this term “classical physics” and another term “classical logic” and people think they are related. They aren’t.”

Are we that stupid? I guess, our enemies wish we were…

***

Only those who have never heard of Platonism would not be familiar with the notion that logic is not “material”: it is at the core of Plato’s view of the universe. And also at the core of Christianism, so help me not god!

I beg to oppose the dematerialization of logic. Differently from Plato, I have a careful observation of nature, Quantum theory, the mechanics of atomic theory, to back me up. Frankly, relative to what we know now, Plato is an ignorant twerp. So why the reverence for his antique antics? My unforgiving mood is driven in part by the observation that the Ancient Greeks had plenty of holes in their axiomatics… Especially in mathematics (where they made several ludicrous mistakes, such as forgetting non-Euclidean geometry, generations after discovering it).

If logic is not tied to “physics”, or what’s material, we want to know what that is. But, as I am going to show, all we do is go back to the Gospel of John as the ultimate authority (itself straight out of Plato!)

Twentieth Century physics has revealed that physics is made of “Fundamental Processes” (see the very nice, pre-QCD book by that title from Feynman)… And Quanta. The former, the processes, are described by waves, the second, those lumps of energy, by particles.

Thus, saying that “logic is not physics” is tantamount to saying that logic is neither a fundamental process (or set thereof), nor quanta (or set thereof).

Orbitals to an electron around a proton (the Hydrogen atom), visualized in 2013 (Phys. Review). What you are looking at is one electron, when it is delocalized. The electron is the cloud. The cloud is a process. The process is what an atom of hydrogen is, 99.9999999% of the time… At least…

There are several problems with such a claim: far from being immaterial, any logic shows up as quanta (aka “symbols”), and is itself a process (classical logic rests on implication, the simplest process:”if A then B”, and chains therefrom). Logic shows up as nothing else, so that’s what it is: a bunch of fundamental processes and quanta. This is the modern philosophy of physics, in action! (It originated with Newton and Laplace, and was then amplified by Jules Henri Poincaré)

There was a famous exchange between Heisenberg and Einstein; the latter, at the peak of his glory, accused the young Quantum physicist to have only put observables in his matrix quantum theory. Heisenberg coolly smirked back that it was Einstein who taught him to do so! (Constructively infuriated, ten years later Einstein rolled out the EPR thought experiment, alleging a contradiction between Quantum Mechanics and LOCAL “elements of reality“. The effect was relabeled “entanglement” by Schrödinger, now the central notion in Quantum theory… Einstein should have realized that it was this very delocalization which made atoms wholes…)    

So what’s “material”? What’s observable! And what is observable? (Delocalized) fundamental processes and (localized, yet ephemeral) quanta. Claiming that the logos is neither is (implicitly) done in the first sentence of the Gospel of John, and John adds that its name is god. We of the natural school shall excommunicate those evoking god. Those who claim “logic”, the logos, escapes nature (= physis) are just followers of whom John followed, namely Plato. They are Platocrats, a particular prototype of plutocrats…

Fundamental processes are described by equations, but that doesn’t mean the equations are “real”, beyond symbols (“quanta”) of a medium. First of all, equations are approximations: a classical computer can only make a finite number of operations (differently from a full Quantum computer, which works with a continuum, the circle S1). Instead what is really real is the fundamental process(es) the equations approximate.

Indeed, consider atoms: they are real, “indivisible” (sort of)… and yet mostly made of delocalized processes known as electronic orbitals.  It is the delocalization which creates the substance: see the picture above… 

So is a classical computation a real object, in the aforementioned sense? Yes, because it is a FINITE set of fundamental processes (moving electrons and photons around). However, if the proposed computation, or logical deduction, takes an infinite amount of time, it becomes something that never comes to exist. (That’s an allusion to a classical computer trying to duplicate Quantum computers; in the case of the chlorophyll molecule, no classical computer could do what the molecule, viewed as a Quantum computer, does!)

In this view, call it material logic, time, whether we want it or not, whether logicians realize it, or not, is an essential part of logic: the time-energy principle de facto granulates time (we need infinite energy for infinitely small time intervals, hence for would be infinite logical computations). To say time is not part of logic is another of these oversights (as Archimedes did, implicitly using what non-standard analysts, Robinson and Al. called “Archimedes Axiom”, which excludes infinitely small (or large) integral numbers). Any piece of logic comes with its own duration, namely how many steps it needs in its simplest form.   

Quantum computing uses one (hypothesized) infinity: the assumed instantaneity of what I call the Quantum Interaction (aka Quantum Collapse). That enables to delocalize Quantum logic (no distributive law of propositional logic!), as delocalized Quantum processes, and this is why it can’t be classically duplicated (aka “Quantum supremacy”).

Happy processes!

Patrice Aymé

OLIGARCHIES ARE INTRINSICALLY EVIL

Times change, and so do minds. For 9,000 years of civilization, slavery was viewed as natural. However, queen Bathilde of the Frankish empire outlawed it around 655 CE. Now nobody says aloud that slavery is natural.

However everybody believes, but for a few anarchists, that the principle of leadership is natural. That is the Fuererprinzip (Nazi semantic), but Obama himself said it was a fact (although he himself, like Clinton, was only nominally a leader).

I will explain here why oligarchy is intrinsically evil.

Oligarchies are, by definition, the rule of the few. They want always more power. There are three classes of reasons for this:

1. The more power one has, the easier it is to get more, as I demonstrated in “Evil, Plutocracy, Exponentiate”. For example it was much easier for Obama to get the Nobel Peace Prize than the US presidency: the Norwegian oligarchy loves a winner: surely having brown skin was not enough (maybe Obama, or his devoted agents, or, even more important his mighty sponsors, would reciprocate? What else? Surely it was not Obama’s bombing weddings with robots in countries the US was not at war with?)
2. The Dark Side is intrinsically nice for those who practice it: it provides with previously, and otherwise unknown neurohormonal flushes. Thus the monarch learns to enjoy to send people to death (and finds even advantageous to advertize it, when the monarch is hyper powerful, like Tiberius or Stalin).
3. Distributing life, death, torture, extermination, extinction is metaphysically satisfying: it turns the perpetrator into God. Or. more exactly the neurohormonal excitation of giving death is so intoxicating, it uses, and provides with, in particular, the feeling of omnipotence, that it gave rise to this omnipotent, jealous and malevolent abstraction known as “God” (contemplate Him in the Bible).

There are reasons in nature for evil. But there are no reasons for oligarchies. Thus, oligarchies, themselves a fruit of the unholy coupling of civilization with the Dark Side, need even more evil to stay in power, than brought them in to start with…Another name for oligarchs is slavemasters. We outlawed the latter when they buy and sell people. Why not outlaw the former, when they order people around.

***

Yes, we need energy to fly a plane, and a plane is no natural phenomenon. However planes are good, they are necessary evils. Same with oligarchies. Some oligarchies are necessary: say the orders of doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, the military. If we need them, built them, use them. But if we don’t, when they are unnecessary evils, let’s do without.

One obvious area where oligarchies shouldn’t exist is politics and economics. I am not exactly the first to believe this: that’s one of the ideas subjacent to the 5 stars movement in Italy, which just got one third of the vote there last Sunday, as expected.

Nobody says aloud that slavery is natural anymore. Slavery has become abhorrent. Let’s do the same to oligarchism! It has to become abhorrent. Some may say: what for? Because oligarchism, by confining power to a few, also confines the mental powers which matters to a few, hence ruins the potential for debate, and thus intelligence. The potential intelligence of the civilization that it rules over with its conspiracy of tiny brains. We had a civilization with an increasingly tiny brain before: Rome. It didn’t finish well. Similarly, Chinese history shows a succession of dynasties, and collapses, from a similar mechanism: at the end of each, ideas are hard to find, as only a few minds minded the “Mandate of Heavens”, and were unable to find solutions to the last few catastrophes…

 

Patrice Ayme

Loving Life Is The Way. Leif Ramos (1972-2017).

My brother-in-law Leif suffered a heart attack ten years ago, and was given a bypass. His father had died of a heart attack. He followed a scrupulously correct vegetarian and exercise diet thereafter. However, he also had to be “off the grid” for mitigating interest on non-reimbursed student loans. In the USA, nowadays, student loans are never forgiven: the chains which hold the slaves down, are not made of metal anymore.

Whereas the colossal, multi-billion dollars debts of plutocrats such as Donald Trump, or any of the millions of California homeowners millionaires are readily forgiven, it is not the case for modest students without rich parents. Then  interests pile up and states “garnish” whatever income the ex-student, now a victim, may incur. Nice, keeps the low lives in check! This efficient, apparently neutral mechanism drives millions of US citizens into the underclass (precisely those who had the effrontery to want to learn something). If one’s parents belong to the .1%, student loans are a rounding error. For others, it’s a crushing burden. Indeed, the rest of the US can live in slavery: it fits them just right. For not revolting, and just swallowing all the lies served to them, as if they were delicious junk foods.

Leif paddling in his state of Alaska. Nature is the way, tempered by humanity.

Leif had a second heart attack December 1, 2017. Five stents were installed. His surgeon had to leave for a scheduled trip, but asked the hospital to keep him in hospitalized. However, Leif had no health insurance, thus the hospital, searching, as they all are, for higher profits, kicked him out, after the surgeon left for very far places, overseas (this was all happening in Anchorage, Alaska, travelling from there generally means long flights on the other side of an ocean, or two).

Leif did worse on December 30th. He apparently tried to drive himself to another, more hospitable, hospital, Alaska General. At 5am. He nearly made it.

He leaves behind a loving family, including his ailing mother, herself with her own heart trouble, now doubled.

Leif’s life was not easy, and made him suffer, in a number of inordinate ways, but it was worth having, he took it with a smile.  

***

Leif with aurora. His award-winning pictures are there to stay. So are his musical compositions.

Leif loved life. That sounds simple, but it’s not. Life is not the grid all too many others are forced to live on (thus perpetuating it in its sorry state). People know this more easily in Alaska and Hawai’i, some of those increasingly rare places on Earth where it is possible to stay in touch with nature. Leif’s love of life forced him, greatly from circumstances he didn’t control, to live off the grid. Loving life requires to go further than just being told what to do.

Who knows what to do correctly in life, who doesn’t love life?

One can’t tell all & sundry, life is absurd, or unlovable, then switch around, been good, well-meaning, giving.

One may not get back all the love one gives to life, but one has to: others will, that’s how humanity is. How humanity became possible.

Leif’s love of life is a mood worth caring forth. What better choice is there? Loving other creatures and the world they share, with us, is not just the best we can do. It’s the only thing humanity can do, and the most significant thing humanity, overall, has done and does. As long as we keep on sharing this way of having a world, Leif lives with us. Let’s live!

Patrice Aymé

Of Gods, Mice and Laws: Just Pretend, Knowing You Pretend!

Western Europe has (finally) turned pretty secular, but not so the rest of the world. One should remember that, thanks to secular Greco-Roman law which ruled the most civilized parts of Europe for 26 centuries, Europe was never as completely god-crazy as the rest of the world. Neither was China, and this fundamental secularism explains probably the superiority of China and Europe in civilizational matters.

Eugen R finds “that the Universe is governed according the law of mathematics an oddity, and not a necessity of existence. How came these laws to existence?”Einstein, even more basically, couldn’t believe the universe was comprehensible. But it is com-prehensible because the universe has laws and thus can be apprehended. Eugen ruminations in “God. Programmer?” are more bleak than I think is wise. So here is my take on it:

If we lived in a universe which had no laws, such as plutocracy (which is intrinsically lawless), we would not be able to get a handle on the universe. And this is exactly what is happening, and why.

The Gods are the jokes the higher-ups have always played, and pretend to believe they mean everything that matters, so they could not just live better, but feel, and even act, better!

Laws of nature are given: this is a fact, the baby becomes cognizant of within minutes of coming to the world: close the eyes, and rest, comfort is given.

If truly in denial of the laws, one couldn’t live accordingly, because one would die right away. Even the craziest religious fanatics, know enough true physics not to die quickly: they don’t jump off windows, and don’t crash headfirst to get into the bus!

To be part of this world, this natural world, is to be law-abiding, to a very great extent, because otherwise we won’t be: to be lawful, or not to be. There is no alternative to natural laws, but death, prompt and definitive. All human beings learn this, starting as infants. When our great leaders, political, commercial or spiritual, act otherwise, as if they could make the laws, they lie to us.

“God” is just a concept claiming we still have a well-meaning parent teaching us the laws, and if we just please the deity, everything will be OK in all ways. Whereas we truly have no one, and especially nothing to guide us… Except for the laws of nature. But this claimed assumption, that the maker of laws can be befriended, self-hypnotize us, and those we want to rule.

Whether a “programmer”made the laws of nature or not, is irrelevant to the world of facts: the laws are in evidence, the “programmer”is not (notwithstanding that Aztecs could point at hummingbirds everywhere, and their main deity was a hummingbird, of sorts). There are enough laws to learn and search for, that we don’t need to spend time searching for something outside of the universe.

The evidence, instead, is that the laws of nature are here alone, they are primary actors. Why would there be a need to suppose that some agent made it so that jumping in a lava lake is deadly? All we know, is that trying to swim in lava would be deadly. And that’s enough to survive that one.

Those who claim natural laws are from the actions of a supernatural agent, generally are themselves easily found out to benefit from such claims. Thus their alleged supernaturalism turns out to be all too human for their comfort… and against that of those who trust them.

Ultimately, laws of mathematics are just laws of the neurology, thus laws of physics. Physics is all the god we have, but it is a mighty one and it doesn’t forgive.

All we can do, is to humanize the universe, and make our own god(s), knowing full well we did. Just as my daughter told me to do when she was two, and she wanted to learn from some role play, while I eyed the whole thing skeptically: “Just pretend!”

Patrice Ayme’

P/S: EugenR:”As in most of the cases I fully agree with you. The question is how to influence those who don’t make the effort to use their human capacity to comprehend reality based on evidence and not imaginary reality based on wishful thinking and flattery.”

PA: Happy we agree, as usual… As I said, many individuals have large base material interest to foster superstition (what stands above [nature]). The vast masses also have interest to just pretend that there are human deities up there, as it makes the world less inhuman, a place where baby thinking works, a return to very comfortable infantilism, the thing closest to the deepest, most comfortable slumber.
The solution, then, is to explain what is going on, and why pretend is OK, as long as it does not have too much of a deleterious impact on nature, human and not.

Giving A Meaning To It All

Intelligence, A Religion For Our Times, Just The Same As In The Oldest Times:

Religion gives life meaning. But yesterday’s superstitious religions have become too implausible, even for modestly educated people in the developed world (to compensate, there is an increasing number of self-advancing cynics who make a profession of embracing completely idiotic religions under the umbrella of moronic “multiculturalistm”) 

Could we turn to public good as a religion? It was done, long ago, in the best republics, or even kingdoms. This is the way the Athenians, Romans, and the old Swiss had it. No such luck: the non-superstitious religion, the devotion to the Res-Publica, the sort of religion the Romans practiced 23 centuries ago, at the height of their Republic, is sinking in a sea of corruption.

Beauty. Something to understand, as it differs so much from the mundane. Do the esthetics of the rare and mysterious appeal to us so much because we are compelled to figure it out? Thus is it the desire to understand the root of the craving for the beautiful?

The corruption is not just by politicians and their friend getting extremely wealthy (exhibit number one here is the US “Democratic” Party, where a respected demoncrat such as Senior Senator Diane Feinstein made a billion dollars no questions asked, except yesterday, April 18, when some real democratic activist interrogated her directly something related; Feinstein took it really badly and told them that, if they didn’t like her, they could leave the meeting…).

The corruption to the “representative democracy” system is intrinsic from having too few people with way too much power.

So what’s left to venerate? Well, the very essence of humanity. The core, the essence of humanity, is intelligence. It should be an object of veneration, a cult (as I already argued). Praying to that god will mean thinking hard enough to stop believing in what one was believing before, to some extent, in many ways.

Some will scoff that my new religion does not answer the traditional metaphysical questions, such as:

Why is there something rather than nothing? What’s the meaning of life? Is there a god? Is there a notion of good?

But actually my religion answers the last three: there is no god of the type people believed in previously, not anymore that there is a god of a type the local chimpanzee troop believes in. God is a question of intelligence, yesterday’s god is not any smarter than yesterday’s society.

There is a notion of good, scientifically defined, because there is a notion of pleasure, and a notion of pain, and the gradient between them defines the well ordering of goodness (I just used mathematical notions from set theory and advanced calculus, to provide me with a semantic, harnessing the casual power of mathematics).

“Scientifically defined” means that a theory can be made, and experiences conducted, confirming the theory. “Good” is not that relative. It’s absolute, given the circumstances.

The new religion, same as the oldest religion ever? Intelligence. 

Turn intelligence towards all metaphysical questions.

Example: It’s there an afterlife? Intelligence will turn the question around: Why don’t people ask whether there was a prelife? (OK, some Hinduists claim to remember when they were meritorious cockroaches… Intelligence will scoff with disbelief.)

The meaning of life? Figuring all out which is in the way. The fact there is something rather than nothing is not in the way, it’s no urgent problem which we need to figure out. Whereas we have countless dramatic problems to figure out, lest we want to become bad, rather than good! (Besides, contemporary Big Bang physics, takes for granted that one gets universes out of nothing continually, or, at least, once. I think that’s crazy, but that’s just me, and my opinion is little more supported than that of the herd, some will argue…) 

The preceding shows that striking a metaphysical pose can be highly practical. Oh, and then what is the common practical metaphysics of common people throughout NATO and the rest of the West? Doing the ostrich, head deep in the sand: warm and dark down there, a womb for the incurious.

Some will object that “my religion” the cult of intelligence, is not really new: didn’t Voltaire have Candide declaring:”Il faut cultiver son jardin”? (One must cultivate one’s garden, the fundamental cult of civilization, since, without culture there would neither cult nor food). However, the cult of intelligence is much deeper than agricultural imagery. Human intelligence is several million years old, agriculture, only 10,000 years old, at most (the first cities appeared in Anatolia… before agriculture…)

Intelligence yearns to make the universe into its garden. Instead of the inwardly mood of Voltaire, akin to putting one head’s below some of the green leafy vegetables in one’s garden, akin to putting one’s head in the sand, intelligence desires to fill space and the universe. Fundamentally, the cult of intelligence is the opposite mood, of just cultivating one’s garden. Even if that search for what makes the universe tick and what it’s made of, and how comfy it can be rendered, passes through the inner sanctum of why and how is it that one thinks, or feels, this way, or that.

Thus, the cult of intelligence has to cultivate one’s garden to, but to go “plus oultre“, as Charles Quint put it (Charles V stopped the Conquista of America, for committing a holocaust there; hence we see that Charles V’s intelligence extended not just in physical space, conquering the Americas, but also in ethical space, stopping said conquest! A nice example of the cult of intelligence in action; later emperor Charles V retired to a monastery)

The cult of intelligence was implicitly practiced by the greatest leaders, such as Akhenaten, Solon, Pericles, Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Otto I, even Genghis Khan, etc…

Time to go back to our roots; all-devouring intelligence, cult of the strong, the weak, the caring and the human. Civilization has to construct and deconstruct, with maximal intelligent design, anyway. One can argue that life evolved as the architecture of intelligence, even intelligent design, and so it was, long before nerve cells appeared. The teleonomy (managing at a distance) of Quantum Physics enables to see far out, and implement the smartest (lowest energy) outcomes. Life as intelligence: one cannot get more essential than that.

Patrice Ayme’

Soloing, & Celebrity Cult

We are living in the Internet age, and the plutocratic age. Plutocracy wants celebritism to rule the minds. When people feel, think, and live through celebrities, they are ready to do so through plutocrats.

Plutocrats hence push everywhere for the celebration of the unique act, because unicity is what they extoll.

And no act is more unique, and useful, to plutocrats than those which say life is not important.

My Friend John Bachar Free Soloing, Showing Off. Fell To His Death, Free Soloing

[I was told, Oct. 2015, that this is actually Dan Osman, see comment; Dan was also, and more than John, living off stunts; he died jumping off Leaning Tower, close to where the pic above was taken, when his rope broke.]

Hence it is no wonder that the New York Times wrote a long article on a solo climber (I have known the author, Dan Duane, a friend, for decades, but, as one will see below, this does not make me blind, or, otherwise said, it’s dangerous to be my friend…I have been pitiless with my friend Barack, trying to set him right about non-battlefield usage of drones, in no uncertain terms…).

In The Heart-Stopping Climbs of Alex Honnold, we read that the master of climbing without ropes spends his life cheating death (By Daniel Duane, March 12, 2015).

“Honnold could afford to buy a decent home, if that interested him. But living in a van — a custom-outfitted van, in his case, with a kitchenette and cabinets full of energy bars and climbing equipment — represents freedom. It also represents a commitment to the nomadic climber’s ideal of the “dirtbag,” the purist so devoted to climbing that he avoids any entanglement that might interfere… When he’s not climbing overseas in places like Patagonia, France or Morocco, he lives an endless road trip through the Southwestern desert, Yosemite Valley, British Columbia and points between. Along the way, he has turned himself into the greatest living free-soloist, meaning that he climbs without ropes, alone.

Unroped climbing is, of course, the oldest kind, but ropes and hardware can provide such a reliable safety net that nearly all climbers now use them. This is typically done in pairs, with one climber tied to each end of the rope…”

What happens then is that, if one climber falls, but the rope has been put around prominences, or through safety equipment that the lead climber may have installed (“nuts” or camming device, or ice screw) or found (bolts or pins), then, hopefully, the rope will not break, and the fall not be so long that death or injury will occur.

Sometimes, everything fail, and both climbers fall to death (although this is rarer on harder rock walls). Sometimes the rope fails, sometimes some pieces fall out, and the tumbling leader is gravely injured and the other climber has to go alone for rescue (something that happened to me).

Dan pursues:

“But using gear slows progress. A roped pair, taking turns climbing and fussing with all that equipment, might spend six hours on a climb that a free-soloist floats up in 30 minutes — focusing purely on the pleasure of movement, the tactile sensation of hands on rock. Free-soloing also carries the mystique of self-reliance in the face of extreme risk: On cliffs where even elite climbers employ complicated rope systems, the free-soloist wears only shorts, a T-shirt, a pair of climbing shoes and a bag of gymnast’s chalk to keep the hands dry. Honnold has free-soloed the longest, most challenging climbs ever, including the 2,500-foot northwest face of Half Dome in Yosemite Valley, where some of the handholds are so small that no average climber could cling for an instant, roped or otherwise. Most peculiar of all, even to elite rock climbers, Honnold does this without apparent fear, as if falling were not possible.” “Peculiar” is the word. Some people have defects in their agmydala. Or they just have no culture: the most famous soloists died, soloing.

I sent the following comment:

***

If everybody tried to live like him, nobody would.

That’s the problem.

It’s not a morality, it’s a lethality.

I have climbed my entire life. Much more years that the gentleman. However, there were many close calls. Some from avalanches, including rock avalanches. My closest friends died in the mountain. They were top professionals of climbing, having achieved the highest guiding status in existence. Higher than Mr. Honnold. And one of them soloed at a higher level (he died from an avalanche).

This last friend, Damien Charignon, kept most of his 5-13+ soloing secret. Not to worry his family. And he knew it was amoral. So he did not do it much. I tried to discourage him as much as I could. Because soloing is amoral.

All serious mountaineers have to solo at one point or another. Soloing is not really a choice.

But it should stay an exception. Flaunting it will just bring more death. I have on sighted, roped, including in Yosemite, pitches where famous soloists fell off. And I did not fall (although I was much less of a climber than them).

So what to say? Those with a moral soul will not flaunt soloing. Doing so leads other young, impressionable people to try it, and they would surely die. This has happened many times in the past.

A devil may care attitude is not exactly something to encourage for humanity at large nowadays. There is already much too much of it… Under the sponsoring of corporations determined to instill in all the feeling of playing around with life.

Another example: a French “reality show” called, appropriately enough, “Dropped”.

Ten people died, most of them French, including three celebrities, last week in Argentina, when their helicopters collided.

Some will whine that I am unfair.

Not so. The Argentinian pilots were experienced, the French crafts brand new. The cause of death was clear: even experienced pilots are not trained for formation flying, something very special, and that the military trains for specially. Especially with helicopters, which can rob, each other air, so to speak. “Reality TV” shows love formation flying, and they don’t worry so much human life: celebritism is more important.

Patrice Ayme’

Quantum Metaphysics Unavoidable

 

Quantum everything is unavoidable, because the world is Quantum.

When a non-Quantum explanation is advanced it has to be simple enough to be clearly non-Quantum. Yet, much that was thought to be very simple, turns out to be Quantum!

QUANTUM EFFECTS SHIELD LIFE ON EARTH:

Here is an example: the magnetic shield which protects life originates, everybody agreed, with something more or less like molten iron at more or less at the temperature of the surface of the Sun, circulating below our feet. However, the details did not work out. Researchers at the universities of Washington, Rutgers, Carnegie Institution, just revealed that “Quantum correlations between electrons” were crucial. They help generate twice the thermal convection that the old theory (from 1930), which neglected electron to electron scattering, had found!

Down In Hell, Electrons Collide, Convection Goes Up

“We uncovered an effect that had been hiding in plain sight for 80 years,” Cohen, one of the physicists, said. “And now the original dynamo theory works after all!”

Of course the dynamo theory had to work, for the good and simple meta reason that there was nothing else imaginable in sight! This will to make the dynamo theory work, is an example of metaphysics in action.

METAPHYSICS HELPS DISCOVERY, PHYSICALISM IS ALL THERE IS:

Meta-whatever has its use.

Because of this Meta-Physical reason (the Dynamo Theory HAD to works, thus (some) researchers kept on searching). This is a typical aspect of how metaphysics works. The Will To Explanation is intrinsically metaphysical. (Especially when it is a will to a BETTER explanation.)

According to so-called “physicalism”, a philosophical theory, all that exists in our world (including consciousness) is physical.

Indeed, what else could it be? By definition of physis, nature is all there is. Even the god(s) would be part of nature, should they exist.

(That problem, the problem of who created god, should god exist, makes the existence of god unlikely, let me say in passing; or then “god” is another word for nature, physis… Let a million Jihadists faint.)

Nature is all-encompassing (differently from Allah in the Qur’an, who is one actor out of many, including Shatan, Djinns, Believers, Unbelievers, etc.)

Jealousy is part of nature. So is hope.

***

CLASSICAL PHYSICALISM HAS NO UNKNOWNABLE SOUL, HOWEVER, QUANTUM PHYSICALISM DOES:

All this “physicalism” sounded scary and unlikely, even ridiculous, as long as the world was viewed as made of tiny billiard balls. How could small balls, predictably colliding, do it all? What happened to Free Will? Was god himself deprived of Freedom, let alone Will?

Tempers flared.

However, a Quantum peace should have come all over. All over those aware of the Quantum, and its Wave.

The world is made of Entangled Quantum Waves, and no one knows what this entanglement exactly is, if it has a range, if it collapses. Nor does anyone know how these Quantum Waves really behave in all imaginable cases, nor how they achieve their non-locality, or whether they truly collapse, and then why and how if they do.

This is not just all metaphysical sounding, it is also at the core of extremely practical considerations for making a Quantum Computer. Life is a Quantum Computer. Since god does not exist, we need to make our own.

Nobody has any idea what these Quantum Waves are made of. Space? Mind? Even time seems to be sitting on the sidelines, as the Quantum Waves pass by, and fill the universe.

In other words, by going from Classical mechanics to Quantum Physics, our view of nature went from certain, and certainly all-too simple to the point of silliness, to certainly very mysterious, full of baffling possibilities, and nearly as ethereal as consciousness itself.

Quantum Waves can be proven to exist experimentally… with the correct philosophical perspective.

And they don’t reduce to waves a la Bohm (potential waves), or Born (probability waves; Born got the Nobel for that idea). Quantum Waves’ nature and existence can be demonstrated just a bit better than consciousness itself (especially in academic zombies).

A number of physicists, confronted by the sudden possibilities imagination was overwhelmed with, thanks to the Quantum, got over-stimulated, and fell victim of a collective mania, the Multiverse Derangement Syndrome (an attempt to deny the reality of Quantum Waves).

However, it’s somewhat also deranged to consider nature, and consciousness, while trying to go around the elephant in the bathroom, Quantum Physics, as if it did not exist.

This is what all too many thinkers are apparently doing.

In Quantum Physics as we have it, PARTICULAR aspects (when particles show-up) are an epiphenomenon (that’s why, in particular, the definition of a “particle” is not too clear). All the machinery that leads to the particular is wavy, not to say fuzzy. How much? That’s what both Quantum Computer engineers and fundamental physicists such as Haroche are trying to determine. It is both hard physics, and hard philosophy (as not just the motivations are metaphysical, but the subject at hand, Quantum Waves, is certainly metaphysical, in the sense that it is beyond physics as it is commonly understood).

Those who are interested by “grounding” our fundamental views, in particular metaphysics, cannot ignore the Quantum (and, I add, somewhat more controversially, because the conventional, probabilistic (Born), Quantum Interpretation, denies their physicalism), its Quantum Waves.

Should those who claim to try to ground thinking do so, while disdaining the Quantum, they will look deliberately incomplete. Not to say downright silly.

There are non-Quantum explanations. However physics is Quantum, and what is beyond it, metaphysics, has to recognize it is therefore defined by it.

Patrice Ayme’

In Defense of Metaphysics

Metaphysics Rises From Brainy Ground, Including What Dreams Are Made Of:

Nihilism is what happens when Metaphysics is yanked out. And nothing could be further from the Truth. Much of the trouble with the present planet can be directly tracked to inappropriate Metaphysics. Let me explain this a bit in this first part. Metaphysics is, indeed, about religion, what ties people up together again, but it’s also about Logic (with a capital L).

Metaphysics is everywhere. Everybody uses it, in everyday language. Some will say: ”Oh, that just language.” Yes, but language is ideas, and ideas get embodied as brain structure. So here we see that not only metaphysics exists, but it is physically embodied. Any victim of Jihadism can testify that metaphysics has real consequences.

Before defining Metaphysics, one has to define “physics”. That was what the Romans called nature. Physis is “nature,” from phyein “to bring forth, produce, make to grow” (related to phyton “growth, plant,” phyle “tribe, race,” phyma “a growth, tumor”). Physis is everywhere.

Imagine You Are Being Watched Maybe Help You Be Good

[Helix Nebula, an expanding shell from a dying star, 700 light years away, being transformed into a White Dwarf; ESO Southern Observatory Near IR on the left; visible light, on the right.]

Science is physical phenomena so well known that they can allow us to predict how things will grow.

But in the original sense all discourses about what exists and changes in nature is part of physics. Call this

Common Sense. Call it CS. Metaphysics is about telling a story beyond what we are sure all others will agree they also observed.

The brain is all connected inside: that’s how logic is embodied. Much of it is individualized, call it I. So we have: Metaphysics = I – CS.

CS depends upon one’s tribe. Metaphysics and I are, of course dependent upon the Individual.

And what is the Individual (brain) made of, and with? Experiences. Individualized experiences. All metamathematics is, clearly Metaphysics in some sense (arguably mathematics itself is, literally, metaphysics).

Set Theory is Metaphysics. That can be demonstrated easily: as all genuine Metaphysics, it is full of contradiction(s).

Badiou’s aphorism holds up pretty well: “Set theory is all the metaphysics you need, and physics all of the ontology.” Well, all the Metaphysics you needed to do some basic mathematics in the Twentieth Century… But not even all of it, hence the rise of Category Theory in the 1950s. This demonstrates that Metaphysics is not just beyond physics, it is eminently practical (because the mathematics invented by Grothendieck, PBUH, this advanced Algebraic Geometry is… practical).

Category Theory is very practical Metaphysics.

Carefully tailored Metaphysics can prove much. For example, I can devise Metaphysics where the circle can be squared (I just use my finite mathematics, end of proof).

According to the definition I gave above, the very definition of Metaphysics is that it is the set of all thought systems that harbor contradiction(s) to Common Sense (otherwise it would be Common Sense).

Could we do without Metaphysics?

Of course not. Metaphysics is beyond Common Sense. But we know something exists beyond Common Sense, say for example future or possible science, research projects, and, in general various guesses of all sorts, including artistic ones.

So it’s not all a question of “data”, in the restrictive sense, or, even more generally, “quanta”. Metaphysics is grounded beyond “data” in the restrictive sense. Guesses, intuitions, even desires and provocations, the feeling of what might be, or ought to be, are part of the “data” that grounds Metaphysics.

Our minds are not just grounded in hard facts, personal experiences and feelings, but even dreams, vague tendencies, feelings and emotions, let alone collective rages, and misunderstanding of history, much of it that we harbor in our inner spiritual recesses, as various infantile trauma.

In all this our very individualized Metaphysics are grounded. Lots of dream stuff. So people are invited not to deduce lethal consequences from it.

We need it.

But we also need to understand it. Especially when it animates our thermonuclear hands. Or those of others. Especially those of others. To understand, and fight, the Metaphysics of banksters, greedsters, archeo-imperialists, or Islamofascists, we need better, improved, and fully aware Metaphysics.

Patrice Ayme’