jameswharris

“Who Knows Where The Times Goes” at 4am

The older I get, the more I think about time. Maybe that’s because I’m running out of time, or maybe time is just how we link our memories.

Now that I’m retired my sleep patterns are changing. I guess work made me a solid sleeper. Now I sleep whenever I feel like it, and more and more I find myself waking up in the middle of the night. I’ve discovered 4am is a great time to listen to music on the headphones. This morning’s random play started with “Who Knows Where The Time Goes” sung by Judy Collins.

One reason 4am is a great time to listen to music is because my mind exists in a disassociated dream-state. Music and lyrics trigger images and thoughts that don’t surface during the daylight hours. Since I also have a bit of a cold, my mind was even more weird. Colds make me nostalgic, and listening to a song about where did the time go really pushed that button. I even played it twice.

I do not fear the time

Who knows how my love grows

Who knows where the time goes

Me and my friends are getting older and we often talk about where does the time go, and lament that time is running out. If I live an average lifetime, I only have about as many years as I did from 2000 till now. That’s both a lot of time, and not very much. I already know many from my generation that have passed on, and the people I spend time with are becoming old friends in both age and the length of time I’ve known them.

Getting old sucks, but what can you do about it? I have a philosophical bent that lets me enjoy my decay, but my friends think I’m morbid.

There’s a weird dichotomy between the people I knew before thirty, and those after forty. Some of my “new” friends I’ve known for twenty years, yet sometimes when I’m hanging out with them I feel like I’m with strangers. Maybe blood kinship only feel tighter because those are the people we’ve known since the beginning of our personal time, and everyone we met after we’ve adultified still feel like strangers.

Since my playlist was on random, it was rather serendipitous that the next song was “Old Friends” by Simon and Garfunkel. It was a song written back in the 1960s imagining being old at seventy I realized that Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel are now in their seventies.

Can you imagine us years from today

Sharing a park bench quietly

How terribly strange to be seventy

Old friends

There are damn few people I knew growing up that I’m still in contact with now. What’s funny is I used to wonder back in the 1960s what all those rock stars I admired then would be like in their seventies. Now I know. It’s so fucking weird to see Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones on TV. I’m still playing albums those guys made back when, picturing them from their classic covers, but seeing wrinkled old coots on my TV screen.

In the darkness, half asleep, I think about how Susan and I are getting old, and so are all our friends, and how we’re all worrying about becoming feeble or demented. I seem to worry about different things things than my lady friends. They hate so much not being young, but they seem to have their health. My friend Connell and I, worry more about our failing bodies. We don’t mind the wrinkles, but know our bodies aren’t going to hold out like the ladies, who will probably all last until their nineties. Connell and I think we’ll fade away before our eighties. I’ve known Connell since 1966, so we’ll be old friends in our seventies. Some of my lady friends might have as many years ahead as they’ve had since 1980.

While listening to “Old Friends” in a dreamy state, half in, and half out, of consciousness, I had many revelations about time, things that seemed so insightful in the four o’clock hour of the morning, but now lost in the light of day. I wish I could recapture the brilliance of my visions, but I can’t. I live a strange life now by not working, spending most of my time processing the past. I still do things in the now with friends, but my nine-to-five time is mostly spent in the profession of studying the relics of time. I am a temporal archeologist.

I graze on time. I study science that chronicles billions of years. I read histories that span thousands of years. I read novels from the past three centuries. I watch movies that span nine decades. I listen to popular music that span the same nine decades. I read biographies that take me up and down the past. I study 3,000 year old religions and philosophy that are distilled from 300,000 years of ancient thoughts. I graze on time while my own dwindling 4D space is being consumed.

The next song that came on was “Hello Stranger” by Barbara Lewis.

Hello stranger

It seems so good to see you back again

How long has it been

Seems like a mighty long time

How very strange, because it feels like I’m constantly reacquainting myself with old friends.

Wow, three songs in a row about time, what a coincidence. Maybe fate is telling me something. Or maybe time is very essential to song writing. I wonder if I went through my playlist of All Time Favorites at Spotify, how many songs will I find about time?

Laying in the 4:14 am dark, with my eyes closed, in a serene state of floating consciousness, listening to my Spotify playlist through an old pair of Sony Walkman headphones attached to my iPod touch, I realized just how much time I spend consuming the past. I study cosmology about things billions of years old, and evolution about things millions of years old, and history of things thousands of years old, and pop culture that spans hundreds of years, and my parent’s life since 1916, and old movies of the 1930s and 1940s, and my life since 1951, and rock music and science fiction since the 1960s, and computers since the 1970s, and computer networks since the 1980s, and the internet since the 1990s, and all the great TV shows since the turn of the century.

I could restate that list over and over again with different examples.

I now like to think of my memory as a timeline, and my life in retirement is about moving up and down that timeline learning new stuff to fill in the ticks of time. Laying in the dark I think of all the people I’ve known, many of which are dead, or I’ve lost contact with, who exist along my timeline since 1951. Interspersed between the memory of people on the timeline are songs, and next to the songs are books I read while listening to music. Or maybe television shows I watched with different people, or places I visited with other people. It does seem like a mighty long time.

Time is the thread that ties everything together, and who knows where it goes.

JWH – 7/13/14

Whatever Happened To The Beatles?

When I was growing up, back in the 1960s, there was a band called The Beatles that was more famous than any other band. From 1964 to 1969 they were always in the news, always on the radio, often seen on television, setting the pace for sixties pop culture. You heard their songs everywhere, either ordinary folks just singing, or professionals covering their tunes. I bought all their albums as they came out, with each new release a big occasion. Then The Beatles broke up and everyone was sad.

Years later, when CDs came out, I bought all The Beatles albums again, but this time the albums were different from when their songs came out on LPs in the 1960s. The CD albums were repackaged like they had been first released in England as LPs. For a while, this brought The Beatles back into my life. For decades when I listened to music it was by listening to CDs, and now and then I’d play The Beatles. I still thought of them as the most famous band on Earth.

Starting many years ago I switched to Rhapsody subscription music, and after a few years to Rdio, and after another few years to Spotify. I listen to streaming music at my computer, or when walking around with my iPod touch, or on my big stereo through my Roku connected to my receiver. The Beatles have never been on streaming music. As I slowly stopped playing CDs, The Beatles were forgotten. Then they released their albums again on remastered CDs. I bought them all except Yellow Submarine. However, I didn’t even play all these new CDs because I’ve gotten out of the habit of playing CDs. Some of those remastered CDS are still in the shrink wrap. Maybe I’ll get around to them eventually, but streaming music is my habit.

I’ve gotten so used to listening to streaming music that if I can’t add a song to my playlists, or call the album up when I think about it, it doesn’t get played. So I don’t’ hear The Beatles anymore. This year when they had all the 50th anniversary stuff it was fascinating to watch on TV. That would have triggered memories and gotten me to add some of their songs to my playlists, if they had been available on Spotify, but since they weren’t, I haven’t.

I said to my wife, “I wonder what Beatles songs I’d add to my playlist if they were available?” I never found out, because they still aren’t on streaming.

I have two sets Beatles CDs, plus all their songs ripped to my computer, and even uploaded to my Amazon Music and Google Music accounts. Rhapsody/Rdio/Spotify has ruined me. I now think of music as what I hear everyday from Spotify. I sometimes get out my favorite albums I play on Spotify and play them on CD just to hear their better sound quality, but I don’t play The Beatles because I don’t remember them anymore. My music world has become Spotify, and The Beatles are not part of that world.

I know people who still play The Beatles, not their CDs, but digital songs they’ve stolen or bought as singles. Those folk are still stuck in the past of owning music. Statistics show streaming music is catching on, and even the number of illegal downloads are down. Sales of purchased digital songs are down too. If stolen and bought songs are in decline, and renting is on the increase, when are people going to play The Beatles?

I wonder if other people are like me, and have forgotten The Beatles because their songs aren’t available via streaming music? Well, new people who never knew The Beatles don’t even know what they are missing. But for us old farts, it’s, “Whatever happened to The Beatles?” It’s a new world out there when it comes to discovering and playing music. Some bands are bucking the trend because of the money. And I can understand that. But music seems to be in two places now, either live or streamed. Who plays albums anymore? Or the radio?

Hey, whatever happened to The Beatles?

JWH – 7/10/14

Can I Defrag My Brain?

Conventional wisdom says we only use ten percent of our brains. Well, that’s been debunked by scientists in various ways. There are plenty of articles on the net that explain why this meme is an urban legend. We don’t have a lot of extra capacity idling under the hood, especially as we get older. At sixty-two I feel my brain is so chock full of facts that to learn a new phone number requires forgetting another number. It’s like my brain is a computer hard drive at 99.9% usage. I need to delete files to make room. With computer hardware we can defrag ours drives, putting all the fragmented files into continuous order, thus speeding up access to our data, freeing up space, and even discovering bad sectors.

Is it possible to defrag our wetware too?

I need to speed up access to my stored thoughts, fix links to lost facts, delete old memories to have space to learn new things, and make my old brain run more efficiently. Is that possible? I’m not sure if our wetware uses linked lists, but it sure does feel like it. It seems like I recall information by association to related information. And nowadays I often can’t remember particular tidbits of data because my links are broken. What I need is to defrag my mind.

This little TED film is very enlightening. It explains why multitasking is wasteful, and why I can’t think when I’m tired and hungry. If I’m theorizing I can defrag my brain, I’ll have take energy use into consideration. This DNews flick below shoots down the ten percent idea too, but it does claim we could do more with our brains if we worked harder. I’m thinking I need to work more efficiently with the remaining capacity I have, especially since my mental abilities are obviously in decline, and I can’t add new capacity. I’m not being a defeatist, but accepting the reality that aging involves decay. I really wished I did have an auxiliary memory though.

One thing that really helps me defrag my brain is blogging. Struggling to put my thoughts into a coherent essay is almost exactly like taking widely disperse file fragments on a hard drive and putting them in one continuous file. Not only does writing help me organize my thoughts, but making them coalesce into a unified structure seems to delete smaller thoughts from my brain. I have no idea if this is true or not, but it feels that way. Each time I write a good essay I feel like I’ve deleted a bunch of aborted drafts and stacks of 3×5 cards.

Many scientists have describe dreaming as a way the brain cleans up each day’s experiences and throws out the unneeded memories. This sounds like a kind of defragging of files too. Often during the day when I’m too tired to write, I’ll take a nap and when I wake up my brain is clear again. I think partly this is recharging the brain, like recharging a battery, and partly sleep must clean out chemical waste that clogs my neural pathways, but it also feels like my unconscious mind has been processing my thoughts too, like organizing paper files into folders for my conscious mind, because when I wake up my thoughts feel more orderly.

The first film takes exception with multitasking, and I think they’re right. I find that my brain feels more efficient if I try to do fewer things. Now that I’m retired I my brain seems freed up to think about new things. I worry about less crap now, which makes me think the old adage, “Use or lose it” is a kind of mental defragging tool. Want to erase memories? Avoid thinking, worrying and studying a subject.

One of my life-long models of behavior comes from the 1950 science fiction film Destination Moon. When making their initial lunar landing, our fictional astronauts use too much fuel, so they don’t have enough rocket juice to return to Earth. The solution is to jettison as much mass as possible from the spaceship so the fuel they do have is enough to make it back home. Many self-help books promote the idea that if you want to succeed with your ambitions its best to have only one goal. I never could do that, and I’ve never been great at anything in my life. Now that I’m old I realize the same principle applies to coping with aging. The older I get, the more I realize I’ve got less fuel to get me through the day. The key to fighting this problem is to jettison tasks that don’t matter so I have to fuel to to do what matters most.

But I’m learning to do things that the astronauts in Destination Moon didn’t know how to do – make more fuel. Eating better, exercising, and sleep either give me more fuel, or makes my old brain run more efficiently so I can do more with less. I’m still on a downward spiral towards an eventual heat death of my universe, but every little bit of order I gather now seems to fight personal entropy.

One thing I’m learning lately is being a news addict is counter productive. More news means less news remembered. I love reading the “news” on the internet about all kinds of subjects, watching news shows and documentaries on television, and reading as many books as I can, but I’m discovering it’s better to take in fewer stories and concentrate more on one idea at a time. This is very hard to do, because so much is going on in the world and it feels like I’m missing out if I don’t pay attention to everything. Not watching the NBC Nightly News feels like I missed out on what went on around the world that day. But you know what? I’ve watched thousands of episodes of the nightly news and I can’t remember 99.9999% of what I’ve seen. I record the news on my computer’s DVR, and I’m learning to skip through certain kinds of stories. This has a defragging effect on my brain. Eventually I might stop watching the news altogether, but right now I can’t break that habit.

I’m finding it more satisfying to read a whole bunch about one interesting topic than learn a little about a hundred different of subjects. I think either way I’m going to forget most everything I learn, but it’s more satisfying to gorge on one subject than graze on a thousand. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll retain a little more of that one subject.

This is analogous to a computer’s CPUs and multitasking. Our brain’s main loop can time slice many subprograms, but the more we have going, the slower our brain runs. Having fewer interests and worries speeds up processing on the functions we do keep running.

I don’t know if it’s scientifically possible to defrag my brain, but I sure am trying.

JWH – 7/9/14

How Jesus Became God by Bart D. Ehrman

There once was a guy named Jesus. He sounded like a pretty cool guy if you believed some of the savings he was supposed to have said. Then his followers made him into God, and people became more interested in what was said about him, rather than what he said. That’s too bad. Bart D. Ehrman, has written a book that explains how Jesus became God after he died, and then became God while he was alive, and then became God before he was born, and then became God before any of us were born. Ehrman’s book could have also been called When Jesus Became God, and to a very minor degree, it could have been called Why Jesus Became God.

I would have entitled it, Too Bad Jesus Became God.

How Jesus Became God is a history book. It’s not about theology, but many readers will find it undermines their beliefs. To be fair, Ehrman bends over backwards, constantly explaining how and why he’s writing history, wanting to avoiding any theological implications. We’ll never know the theological truth in this life, but we can get ever closer to the historical truth. By summarizing how the followers of Jesus changed their opinions about the man they worshipped in the decades and early centuries after his death, we don’t learn anything new about Jesus, but a whole lot about the history of Christianity. Because Jesus left no primary sources about what he believed, we can never know anything about the man, all we can know is what other people thought about him long after he died.

I’m afraid when the faithful read this book they will bring their beliefs to the reading and that will distort what Ehrman has to say. Ehrman stands outside of Christian faith and ask the question: How did Jesus become God? He is a historian, so he makes no assumption whether Jesus is actually God or not, but analyzes what we know about early Christians to decide how they made Jesus into a God. Ehrman uses textual analysis to date each idea about Jesus that emerged after his death, and to pick through the paltry facts like a CSI detective hoping to find additional clues. Ehrman tries to answer two main questions. First, did Jesus think of himself as God or divine? Second, studying the writings of Paul, the four Gospels, and Acts, Ehrman asks, when did his believers think Jesus became God – at his resurrection, his Baptism, his conception, or from the beginning of all time?

Bart D. Ehrman introduces his book at Huffington Post. It’s a good summary to read if you’re thinking about buying the book. He opens with:

Jesus was a lower-class preacher from Galilee, who, in good apocalyptic fashion, proclaimed that the end of history as he knew it was going to come to a crashing end, within his own generation. God was soon to intervene in the course of worldly affairs to overthrow the forces of evil and set up a utopian kingdom on earth. And he would be the king.

It didn’t happen. Instead of being involved with the destruction of God’s enemies, Jesus was unceremoniously crushed by them: arrested, tried, humiliated, tortured, and publicly executed. And yet, remarkably, soon afterwards his followers began to say that — despite all evidence to the contrary — Jesus really was the messiah sent from God. More than that, he was actually a divine being, not a mere human. And not just any divine being. He was the Creator of the universe. After long debates among themselves they decided that he was not secondary to the one God of Israel, the Lord God Almighty himself. On the contrary, he was fully equal with God; he had always existed for eternity with God; he was of the same essence as God; he was a member of the Trinity.

How did that happen? How did we get from a Jewish apocalyptic preacher — who ended up on the wrong side of the law and was crucified for his efforts — to the Creator of all things and All-powerful Lord? How did Jesus become God?

To Christians, Jesus is God, but to historians, Jesus is no different from any human in history. Ehrman is studying the theologians and not the theology. If you are willing to take How Jesus Became God as a purely history book it’s quite fascinating and illuminating about the early development of Western civilization. If you are a believer, this book could be painful because it treats Christianity no different from pagan mythology that also existed in the first centuries of the common era.

I hope this won’t be insulting to Christians, but most of the ones I know aren’t very intellectual about their theology. Most, just want to believe in God, an afterlife, heaven, and the promise they will meet their dead kin and friends again. How that happens is inconsequential to them. That’s why modern Christianity is based on faith and belief. Reading How Jesus Became God will show there is a complex history of theology to how belief in believing evolved. Ehrman makes an excellent case that while Jesus was alive, and even just after he died, Christians believed you had to do good deeds to get into heaven, and that Jesus did not think of himself as divine. It took decades, centuries even, to evolve the theology that Jesus was Christ who existed since the beginning of time as God and believing in him will earn you eternal life in heaven.

This book is about how the followers of Jesus went from thinking of Jesus as a human being to thinking of him as the Trinity. Ehrman documents this from what we know from history. Unfortunately, most of what we know comes from The New Testament, Apocrypha writings, and Gnostic texts. Ehrman’s history is really close textual readings because we have few outside sources about these events. Christians might appreciate Ehrman’s careful delineations between the writings of Paul, the four Gospels, and Acts. What it comes down to is Paul, and the writers of the four gospels had different ideas on when Jesus became God – resurrection, Baptism, conception or the beginning of time. Then the early church fathers argued over these concepts for centuries.

That might seem like meaningless quibbling to most believers, but it does explain why the four Gospels differ. The Gospel of Mark doesn’t include the story of the virgin birth, but that’s because it suggests that Jesus became divine at the resurrection. The writers of Matthew and Luke seem to imply Jesus became divine at Baptism or conception. To have Jesus become divine at conception you need the virgin birth tale. The author of John recreates the ontology of Genesis to put Jesus as God back at the beginning of time.

Now I’m an atheist, but I find all of this fascinating. And I might have a different take on Ehrman’s book, but since I’m not widely read in Christian history, I don’t know how common my questions are. Jesus and his disciples were lower class folk, who were probably illiterate and spoke Aramaic and Hebrew. The writers of the Gospels were educated, literate, and spoke and wrote Greek. I’m wondering if they knew about Greek philosophy and if their theology is a mixture of Hebrew mythology, stories about Jesus, and Greek philosophy. Is The New Testament a cold front of religion meeting the warm front of philosophy?

By the way, we’re leaving Ehrman and moving into my own ideas. I’m into science, but science wasn’t invented yet. At the time of evolution of The New Testament people had very few tools to understand reality. The first, and oldest tool is religion. Religion basically says “God did it” to any question about the mystery of reality. Why is there thunder? It’s a god. How did the universe start? God created it. In terms of understanding the truth, religion offers no validity or real answers. It’s all speculation and wild ideas.

Then came philosophy. Philosophy assumes humans can figure out how things work. Philosophy starts observing reality for clues, but all too often it comes up with bizarre theories for answers, and eventually these are contrived into elaborate beliefs. Because philosophy uses logic and rhetoric, it gives the impression that it’s intellectually superior to religion, even though most of its answers about reality are hardly better than religion. However, logic is sexy, so believers prefer philosophical answers over the dictates of religion, which is basically, “God did it.” Paul is the Plato of Christianity, and Jesus is his Socrates. And the guy who wrote The Gospel of John is out there, way out there, both mystical and philosophical, like one of the Pythagoreans.

From my perspective, Paul is the real creator of Christianity, but he lost control of his religion to the later writers of The New Testament. What Ehrman’s book does is try to chronicle how these later writers change the scope of Christian theology. Even more fascinating is the Gnostic gospels, which appear to try to take Christianity in even stranger directions. What became Orthodox Christianity in the first four centuries of the common era is what worked best at selling a belief that took hold of the Western world for the next sixteen centuries.

Modern day believers of Christianity believe because they hear a few ideas in childhood that are so powerful it overwhelms all their thinking. What Ehrman’s book attempts to do is explain how these memes got created. Many other writers of Christian history attempt to do this too, but Ehrman seems to be particularly good at it, with clear writing, sensible logic and a humble attitude. Ehrman has written a series of books that reflect a lifetime of careful research that explain how and why The New Testament was written. He’s very knowledgeable about The Old Testament, but The New Testament is his specialty, his life’s work.

Most Christians aren’t interested in an intellectual history of their faith. Their religion gives them a wonderful sense of community, beliefs that comfort them in life, and faith that assures them they won’t die, so they know they will meet their departed loved ones in the next life. However, there are Christians, especially evangelicals and fundamentalists who are profoundly interested in the intellectually validity of their beliefs and will go to extremes to validate their faith. Ehrman’s book will cause these people problems. This gets back to my point about philosophy. Philosophy appears to reveal the truth, but it doesn’t. Science is the only system we’ve invented yet that reveals consistencies in reality that we can accept as being true. What we’re experiencing now is the cold front of philosophy banging into the warm front of science.

What Ehrman brings to the table is history, a discipline that is far more consistent than philosophy, but still not science. The fundamental faithful are strong adherents of philosophy, which includes rhetoric and logic. They are confident these tools reveal the truth of reality. But science is showing them that their philosophy is a very poor tool for understanding the truth of this reality.

What Ehrman has accidently taught me is fundamentalists love philosophy because The New Testament is a product of philosophy, and not religion. The Old Testament was pure religion. The New Testament is a hybrid of religion and philosophy, with the later writers of The New Testament being the most philosophical.

And it’s not that philosophy can’t be a useful tool, but it’s only useful if it incorporates the rigors of science. Science depends on logic, and to a degree rhetoric, but is actually about consistency of observations. Science, for the most part, can’t be used to verify theology, because most theology involves the metaphysical, which can’t be observed, tested, and is not falsifiable.

Christianity met up with Greek philosophy again when it kicked the Muslims out of Spain. But that’s not part of Ehrman’s book. I’ve always thought that was Christianity’s first encounter with Greek philosophy, but now I’m thinking different. The New Testament writers were the first influence of Greek philosophers on Christianity, they just didn’t mention their educational background.

It would be fantastic to have a time machine and track down the real Jesus and give him a copy of The New Testament and How Jesus Became God. I get the feeling he’d probably read them and say, “Hey, these stories are about a guy with my name,” and never notice they were about him.

I’m am reminded of stuff I’ve read by Karen Armstrong and Robert Wright, especially in A History of God and The Evolution of God. The God of The Bible has gone though quite a lot of changes himself. He’s a combination of several gods that slowly evolved over a very long period of time. Each time one people would conquer another people, their gods would merge, or one would supplant the other. To me, Jesus became God because Christianity supplanted older religions and had to incorporate or bury older deities, creeds, traditions, etc. Jesus essentially becomes the new God that usurps the Jewish God of The Old Testament, in the same way Yahweh supplanted earlier gods like El, Asherah and Baal.

The early Christians had to do this to succeed and thrive, and boy did they thrive. But it sure is sad that they lost Jesus along the way. It would be interesting to compare the revisionists techniques in the Quran and The Book of Mormon to see how they try to supplant Christian theology.

I wish Jesus had written down his ideas like Plato. To me, humans are interesting, gods are not.

JWH – 7/8/14

Could You Love A Robotic Puppy?

If you could buy a robotic puppy that was indistinguishable from a real puppy except that it didn’t eat, drink and go to the bathroom, would it be as satisfying as having a real puppy? This is probably theoretically, because I don’t know if they could ever invent a robot puppy that smelled like a real puppy, but let’s imagine they could. One that felt, smelled, sounded and looked just like a real puppy. I’m assuming people don’t taste their pups, but roboticists could add that feature too if needed. If this imaginary puppy was a bundle of energy, friskiness, that squirmed and played, licked and nuzzled, just like a real little doggie, would you want one?

Recently I read that a growing statistical segment of young women are choosing to buy small dogs rather than have babies. Small dogs and puppies trigger our gotta-love-the-baby response, so many people find puppies a good substitute to love. What if what we liked about puppies is having this baby love button pushed, and what if a robotic puppy pushed the button equal to a real puppy? If a robot puppy triggered your need to love something cute, and it felt like it loved you unconditionally, like the way we want dogs and small children to love us, would it fulfill your needs so you no longer needed a real baby or real puppy?

Recently in Great Britain they conducted a survey asking people if they’d have sex with a robot. Imagine being able to buy an android that looked exactly like the movie star you find most sexually attractive. Would you bother dating if such a robot took care of all your emotional, sexual and conversational needs?

The Japanese are working on robots to be caretakers for the elderly. If you were old, and living alone and your children didn’t visit much, or not at all, and you couldn’t get out much, would you find a robot good company?

In all these cases I have to ask: What is real? If we can trick our brain so we satisfy its need for cuteness, receiving and giving love, sex and companionship, will we feel it’s real enough? I’ve been thinking about getting a puppy, but when I think about how many times I’m going to have to watch it poop & pee, or take it for a walk, I tell myself I’m crazy. But on the other hand, I’d feel that if it didn’t poop & pee that I’d be missing out on the real experience.

There’s a vast difference between current robotic puppies and real pups.

But what if a robot puppy was as cute and cuddly, warm and fuzzy, wiggly and smelly, as a real puppy, would my brain not urge me to pick it up and play with it? What if it was an intelligent as a dog, could learn, and was as self-aware as a dog? Would it be easier to love a robot if we thought the robot could feel our love?

Little children will play with dolls and stuffed toys for hours as substitutes for babies and animals. Adults will read books, watch television shows and movies, and play video games that simulate reality no better than current robotic dogs. Drug addicts will seek out their drug of choice to replicate sensations, moods, emotions and feelings they can’t find in real life. Many people eat junk food rather than real food. We’re already quite used to fooling ourselves.

Obviously, we’re creatures with urges, appetites, impulses and desires that can be fooled by substitutes for what evolution originally programmed us to seek out. And what explains our desire for work that has no relationship with nature. Why will some people spend hours doing mathematics? In other words, we have created new, novel, and unnatural forms of stimulus to occupy our brains.

I write this essay to contemplate why I desire certain inputs and stimulus for my brain. If you love puppies, have you ever wondered why?

JWH – 6/30/14