One of the books I’m currently reading is yesterday’s post at Cosmic Variance (a blog by astrophysicist/cosmologist Sean Carroll) which, in part, discusses the “measurement problem”, which is basically the quantum mechanic-specific version of the Observer’s Paradox. (Yesterday’s post also happens to contain a link to a very lucid description of non-destructive quantum interrogation, otherwise known as quantum computing. The best part is that he explicitly avoids any cat-killing metaphors.

In the description of the measurement problem, Carroll talks about the major different ways that QM has come to be interpreted: the Copenhagen interpretation championed by Niels Bohr, which states that wave function collapse indeed happens, but the non-measurable states have no real importance and may not even truly exist; the Many Worlds Interpretation, which basically says that every probable outcome results in a branching of the universe; and the hidden-variables interpretation, which states that while we can’t directly measure certain things, they do in fact exist.

I tried slogging through the comments, but what disturbed me was the recurrence of the misconception that consciousness collapses the wave function, when in fact is it physical measurement that collapses the wave function. (According to any of these major interpretations, there is no difference between me opening the box and seeing if the cat is dead or not, or if a robot were to open the box and detect whether the cat was dead or not. There is no need to invoke the anthropic principle here.)

The main issue I have is that we don’t even really know what Consciousness is. You can’t just wield it around like some magic wand.

Which leads me to yet another book I am reading: I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter. So far, I’m getting an idea of what exactly he means by a strange loop. The easier part is simply the recursive nature of consciousness. In computer science terminology, it is a process that basically monitors itself. I haven’t gotten far enough into the book to know, but one of the thoughts that comes to mind is whether or not this process has some causal agency (does my consciousness necessarily allow free-will?) or whether it just happens to be a passenger attached to the actual causal processes that occur subconsciously and are the result of millions of years of evolutionary programming responding to external stimuli, thus giving us the illusion of free-will but never really straying from a deterministic system.

If we ever figure out what it actually means to be conscious, then we may have a chance at figuring out AI, and maybe even how to interpret QM, but until then, Consciousness in the context of QM has no relevance.

Which serendipitously leads me to yet another blog post that manages to encapsulate a lot of my thoughts: Gina Franco (author of reli{e}able signs) excerpts a passage from John Caputo’s description of Jacques Derrida’s thoughts on faith.” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory vol. 6 no. 1 (December 2004): 6-9.”). Apparently one of the Jesuit priests who taught at my high school had also read Derrida. I will always remember that he told us that faith has nothing to do with certainty, and that certainty in fact eradicates the need for faith.

So we find ourselves perched between a scenario where the only things that are real are the things that you can sense, and a scenario where reality is just whatever you decide to make of it. But if QM and deconstructionism can teach us non-physicists and non-metaphysicists anything, it is the fact that reality typically eschews any black-and-white interpretations. Reality is always somewhere in between whatever we can describe.

post

1. adj. post-call, referring to the time period when a physician is finished taking admissions or performing consults. This may refer both to time spent at work or time at home after a call period. Typically this is reserved for the time frame after working 24 hours in a row. Before work hour restrictions were in place, residents would typically stay at work for an additional 12 hours to ensure that all active issues were resolved, for a total of 36 hours in a row. In 2003, the ACGME mandated that the post-call period at work be limited to 6 hours maximum, for a total of 30 hours in a row. See also postal, going postal. 2. n. post-mortem examination, see also autopsy, necropsy.

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “it’s not rocket science” to describe something that should be easy. So Raymond Chen asks what actual rocket scientists say when they want to describe something easy. The common answer seems to be “it’s not brain surgery.”

Turns out that neurosurgery is not exactly the most delicate of surgeries, nor is it a field with all that much hard data. Most of the time, it involves boring a hole in someone’s skull or carving out a chunk of bone, and sort of mucking around in there. While precision would be nice, most of the things neurosurgeons have to do don’t really have the luxury of precision. It’s usually about hacking out a tumor, draining a pocket of pus, or more commonly, evacuating a large expanding collection of blood before the patient’s brain exits out of the foramen magnum, because of increased intracranial pressure, a process that is also known as herniation. Sometimes, they luck out, and it’s not quite so emergent. Then it’s usually about disconnecting parts of the brain to stop intractable epilepsy, or jamming an electrode into the grey matter for some deep brain stimulation. While obviously it takes some surgical skill, it’s nowhere near the incredible precision that is required in fields like pediatric cardiothoracic surgery. (I would hazard to say that it’s not easy to operate on a 6 day old ex-premie.) Other surgical fields that require almost superhuman feats of manual dexterity include vascular surgery (because it tends to be a high risk sort of surgery, mostly because, as clinical language would put it, “you’re working on a pretty poor substrate”), hand surgery (where they use sutures that are finer than a human hair in order to sew together peripheral nerves), and retinal surgery (which is a sub-sub-specialty.)

But if you’re talking about cerebral processing power, I dunno. I’d probably go with either allergist/immunologists or rheumatologists, because they’re both hard core bench-research type of specialties. They’re the physicians who are more likely to be talking regularly about biomolecular signaling pathways and molecular recognition mechanisms. The computer science equivalent would probably be like being able to comprehend straight-up machine language without even bothering with the assembly code.

While I am a physician (although not the kind that does anything cool like the things I mentioned above), I’m certainly not a physicist. When someone says “rocket science,” do they simply mean the engineers who figure out ballistic missile trajectories and how to get a space probe to Saturn with the least amount of fuel? (No mean feat, although they do have the help of computers.) Or do people mean astrophysics? Like cosmology, string theory, the theory of inflation, loop quantum gravity, that sort of stuff? I think it would be pretty impressive to be able to imagine 11-dimensional space-time.

I swear. Who dreams of particle accelerators?

I’ve had this recurring dream of running around the inside of a particle accelerator, usually involving trips into alternate dimensions. I mean, is this supergeeky or what?

The largest supercollider built thus far is the Large Hadron Collider on the border of Switzerland and France.

I keep dreaming about the tunnels, though.

The LHC hopes to find particles hitherto undetected, but predicted by current theories, specifically the Higgs boson. Other questions that are hoped to be answered are whether or not supersymmetry is true, and whether or not we can detect the extra dimensions required for string theory to be valid.

Some people have speculated about possible disasters caused by activating the LHC. These scenarios seem pretty unlikely, considering that cosmic rays with 20 million times the energy that will be generated by the LHC constantly bombard the Earth and we’ve never seen any of these effects. But they’re pretty interesting ideas:

• generation of a stable micro black-hole: if Stephen Hawking is wrong, and black holes don’t evaporate, then a micro black-hole would eventually turn the Earth into Swiss cheese as it rotates.
• triggering a transition to a different quantum mechanical vacuum energy level: if the current theories regarding inflation are true, this would essentially mean generating a Big Bang. In practical terms, we’d probably be vaporized, but what effect it would have on the universe at large is quite unknown.

A decade ago, I remember reading a short-story piece about the abandoned Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, which was going to be even bigger than the LHC. The denouement of the story was the creation of a stable black hole and the resulting destruction of Earth.

The Fool is an auspicious card, depicting potential.

You are The Fool

The Fool is the card of infinite possibilities. The bag on the staff indicates that he has all he need to do or be anything he wants, he has only to stop and unpack. He is on his way to a brand new beginning. But the card carries a little bark of warning as well. Stop daydreaming and fantasizing and watch your step, lest you fall and end up looking the fool.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

I’ve been reading Nothingness: The Science of Empty Space by Henning Genz which examines the phenomenon that we call the vacuum, which, thanks to quantum mechanics, is a much more interesting subject than you might think.

The Fool is card number zero among the major arcana, also depicting Nothingness. But because of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, the vacuum cannot be considered truly empty. Some physicists depict the vacuum as a roiling, chaotic, unpredictable sea of change, poetically named the quantum foam. Ghost particles proliferate then annihilate, preserving the law of conservation of mass and energy. These so called virtual particles pop in and out of existence, usually undetectable. Space as we know it is unrecognizable in the small scale, as quantum fluctuations cause transient tears and holes in the fabric of space-time, and yet space nonetheless appears smooth at a macroscopic level. But in extreme conditions, particularly, relativistic conditions, physicists like Stephen Hawking predict very strange phenomena.

I was first introduced to the notion of the vacuum and quantum foam when I read Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy by Kip Thorne back in the senior year of high school when I had to do a physics presentation. I ended up talking about Chandrasekhar’s limit and the different fates for stars of varying mass. All of the ways a star can die are interesting: white dwarfs, novae, neutron stars—and recently I found out about the possibility of quark stars. But the fate that even non-science people are probably most aware of is the strangest way a star can die, which is to form a black hole.

The study of black holes is likely one of the avenues that will eventually lead to the holy grail of physics: quantum gravity, also known as the grand unified theory, or the theory of everything. Modern physics is a disjointed discipline of two incompatible theories: general relativity, which essentially describes the force of gravity, and quantum mechanics, which describes electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. For the last half-century or so, the most brilliant minds on the planet have struggled with trying to get these two theories to mesh, but so far a solution has proved elusive. The most ballyhooed attempt at reconciling the relativity with quantum mechanics is string theory (and it has an even trendier name: M-theory.) But in many ways, M-theory is not really a theory. So far, it’s just a framework. No testable predictions have been formulated, and as any scientist knows, if you can’t come up with an experiment to test your theory, you’re not anywhere at all.

Anyway, the event horizon of a black hole seems to be a perfect test case for any theory that aims to combine relativity with quantum mechanics. Classically speaking, the reason it’s called a black hole is because neither matter nor radiation can escape its gravitational grasp. Even light, the fastest thing in the universe, is sucked inexorably down into the ill-defined, almost nonsensical concept known as the singularity, an infinitesimal point of infinite mass that is predicted by relativity, but makes no sense whatsoever in quantum mechanics. But that is another mess entirely.

But the weird thing is that Stephen Hawking figured out that black holes should actually give off radiation. And by doing so, they eventually evaporate! The reason is because of virtual particles.

Virtual particles typically come in pairs: a particle and its anti-particle. For example, consider an electron and a positron, particles of equal mass and equal charge, but the charges are of opposite valence: electrons have negative charge, while positrons have positive charge. When these particles collide, they annihilate one another and electromagnetic radiation. These particles are theorized to come into existence and then disappear in time increments basically unmeasurable by our instruments. And no matter how many of these particle/anti-particle combinations pop out of the void, because they always cancel each other out, the laws of conservation of mass and energy are preserved.

But Hawking thought about virtual particle pairs that emerge near the event horizon of a black hole. The particles might pop out of the void with one heading away from the event horizon, and the other into the black hole. The particle heading for the black hole gets sucked into it, never to be seen again in this universe, and therefore, never able to annihilate with its virtual partner. This forces the antiparticle heading away from the black hole to become a real particle. The laws of conservation of mass and energy is preserved because the particle that ended up in the black hole causes the black hole to lose mass and energy. Hence, from the perspective of being outside the event horizon, it looks like the black hole is actually generating radiation, and that this is causing it to evaporate.

In some ways, you can get something from nothing, although in the end, the laws of conservation still hold.

But perhaps what is the most mysterious phenomenon is the origin of the universe itself, the ultimate act of getting something from nothing. It too deals with a singularity, although in reverse. As far as we can tell (and not every scientist agrees) the entire universe seems to have come from an infinitesimal point of infinite mass, expanding inexorably to the 15 billion+ light-year horizons that we can observe, with no signs of stopping.

But how did the singularity come about? (Or are black holes the seeds for baby universes? Do the singularities that are the remnants of dead stars blossom into big bangs that are forever hidden from our eyes behind the point-of-no-return that is the event horizon?)

Why is it that there is more matter than anti-matter? If the universe was the result of a random quantum fluctuation in the vacuum, how did the initial anomaly avoid simply annihilating and returning to nothingness?

Is it all just pure, unbelievable luck? Or maybe intelligent design? Yikes!

One thing I know for sure: never underestimate the power of chaos. That’s the thing that I think creationists/intelligent designers fail to take into account. Chaos can cause unbelievable complexity. That’s essentially what evolution is: random, chaotic events shaping the development of organisms.

Basically, I think that if you believe in luck, then you have to believe in evolution.

Without chaos, everything becomes sterile and predictable, deterministic and fatalistic. Complete order would mean being able to predict the future with utmost certainty. A world that, frankly, wouldn’t need an omnipotent deity to run it. And yet we know that that’s not the universe we live in. We can’t predict what’s going to happen in the next minute, much less the next week, the next year, or the next 15 billion years. Chaos reigns eternal.

From Chaos came Cosmos. From Cosmos, is eternal Chaos.

The universe came from disordered nothingness, and yet the order of the universe is permeated—and maybe even driven—by random chance quantum events like the creation and annihilation of virtual particles.

It sounds like an analog to the Yin and Yang of Taoism.

I think I was meant to be a Discordian.

All hail Eris, Goddess of Disorder.

In any other world you could tell the difference and let it all unfurl into broken remnants. Smile like you mean it and let yourself let go. ‘cause it’s all in the hands of a bitter, bitter man. Say goodbye to the world you thought you lived in. Take a bow, play the part of a lonely, lonely heart. Say goodbye to the world you thought you lived in, to the world you thought you lived in. I tried to live alone, but lonely is so lonely you know. So human as I am, I had to give up my defences. So I smiled and tried to mean it, to let myself let go. ‘cause it’s all in the hands of a bitter, bitter man Say goodbye to the world you thought you lived in. Take a bow, play the part of a lonely, lonely heart. Say goodbye to the world you thought you lived in, to the world you thought you lived in. ‘cause it’s all in the hands of a bitter, bitter man Say goodbye to the world you thought you lived in. Take a bow, play the part of a lonely, lonely heart. Say goodbye to the world you thought you lived in, to the world you thought you lived in. Say goodbye to the world you thought you lived in. Say goodbye to the world you thought you lived in. Say goodbye. In any other world, you could tell the difference.

Apparently this song is actually about someone whose life was irrevocably changed by the war in Lebanon (found by way of mikablog.com)

But as I zoomed southbound on the I-5, the phrase “in any other world” immediately made me think of parallel universes, and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and how I often fantasize that while my own life is pretty goddamn lonely, there is probably at least one alternate universe out there where I actually find and get together with my soulmate. (My fear is that I’ve actually found her at some point in my life, except that I screwed it up royally.)

I thought of that “Sliders” episode where the main characters finally make it back to what appears to be their own universe, only to find out that it’s only an almost-identical copy. The big dealbreaker is the fact that the Golden Gate Bridge is painted blue in that universe. But everything else is pretty much exactly like their home universe. (Of course, I also think about the Simpsons Halloween Special where Homer creates a time-machine and ends up creating all these alternate versions of the present, finally ending up in a universe which seems like his original universe, except that everyone has reptilian tongues. He merely shrugs and says “Eh, close enough.”)

I kind of wonder if the “bitter, bitter man” is a depiction of God. (Or maybe I’m simply projecting. Like Tyler Durden said, your conception of God tends to be based on your conception of your father, and my dad certainly fits the description of being a bitter, bitter man.)

Or the “bitter, bitter man” could certainly be me, and this song is about that part of my soul that I’ve somehow failed to kill, that still hopes that things are going to turn out for the better. The voice in my head that keeps me from committing suicide, and makes me realize that all my fears and all my self-doubts are perhaps illusionary, and maybe the world isn’t as bad as I think it is.

Wow, me, with hope? Who’d’ve thunk it?

And while I’ve been seriously telling myself to let certain things in my life just go for quite a while now, and while I’ve tried lowering my defenses, I still haven’t really gotten anywhere. My soul has been stagnant for quite a long time.

Here’s to hoping.

Maybe things will change. For the better. Maybe.

(The track that is currently playing is “The Perfect Kiss” by New Order)

On the way to work this morning, at the junction of the I-5 and I-8, I gazed at the orange-ringed sky and suddenly thought to myself, “I’m gonna die.”

Not that I was in any imminent danger. It was just the juxtaposition of the enduring beauty of sunrise with the fleeting pleasure of driving too fast, somehow reminding me of my mortality.

I have just watched “The Fountain”, which is a work of vision by Daron Aronofsky (whose resume includes “Requiem for a Dream” and “Pi”) The layers of allusion and symbolism presented in this film have really worked their way into my brain, and have gotten the wheels spinning round and round. I think it would make an English major cream themself, and would certainly warrant at least a scholarly paper or two. And it isn’t the facile symbolism and self-conscious cleverness that M. Night Shymalan tends to exhibit in his work. This is the real deal, tapping in on the literature and philosophy of Western Civ, with a few bits of Mayan ethnography appropriated here and there.

The major theme that resonated with me was the need to accept the finiteness of human life, something that I am forced to confront every so often at work.

Despite what I do, and despite everything I try to avert the final end, there is a stark realization that Death is not a disease. It is a process in of itself, a necessary stage of Life. Without Death, there is no life, not because of some imagined law of conservation of symmetry, but because it is the way the multitude of processes that govern life itself work. Ultimately, we are doomed by the Laws of Thermodynamics, which governs the very molecules, the very electrons and photons, that make up the ultracomplex, multilayered process we call life.

There are probably at least a hundred thousand different chemical processes that occur in our bodies, some as simple as combustion—turning sugar and oxygen into water and carbon dioxide—and some as impenetrably complex as the assembly of intricate lattices and scaffolds that allow the replication of DNA and ultimately the generation of new cells. All chemical processes are beholden to the laws of physics, down to the quantum level, and ultimately, the laws of physics obey the principles of entropy. Entropy ever increases. Because of this, all things, all processes must come to an end.

There is a scene in the movie where Hugh Jackman’s character Thomas Creo says to himself, not grimly, but almost joyfully, “I’m gonna die,” and while this statement is simple and obvious, it also felt like an epiphany. It was enlightenment.

I’ve begun to believe that if we all began to understand, I mean truly understand, that we were all going to die someday, and that if we started living our lives without thought of a possible afterlife, maybe there wouldn’t be so many atrocities committed against each other, maybe we would actually start trying to coexist instead of trying to kill each other. Naiéve and idealistic, I know.

But at the same time, I can’t help ponder how people have warped the prospect of the afterlife into a cudgel to beat the unsuspecting into fearful obedience. Some people wield religion like a weapon, used to persecute and oppress others. (I suddenly think of John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards, not to mention the buffoons and ignoramuses who pass as ministers on the television these days. Pat Robertson, you twisted fuck, I’m calling you out.)

It’s a treadworn cliché: Life is precious. But people don’t seem to give a crap. Until it’s their life at stake.

While Death can often times be a messy, brutal process (although no more bloody or wrought than being born in the first place, and having witnessed both many times, maybe death is less chaotic than birth), I have perhaps had the fortunate opportunity to see people die with dignity. In peace. Not kicking and screaming, not writhing in agony or twisting in agitation, but with a sense of calm sanctity. We will send you off to the unknown, like the maidens who accompany King Arthur to Avalon. We are with you in those last moments, in that final silence when the mind knows no more, and the heart beats ever more slowly.

I suppose there is that. When you die at the hospital, at least you don’t die alone. I’d rather not die by myself sprawled face down on my bathroom floor, but I guess I don’t necessarily fear that outcome. But it would be nice to have someone at my bedside making sure I didn’t go out anxious or in pain.

One of my patients died today. It wasn’t unexpected. We knew early on that his prognosis was pretty poor. Maybe we didn’t think it would happen as fast as it did, although it still took several hours. I’m still learning how to comfort the still-living, though. That, too, is part of the process of Death. Maybe there isn’t always comfort to give. But we try.

Intellectually, I understand the necessity of Death. I understand that it isn’t pathological in of itself. But even at this late date, I still get the willies. Maybe less so than before.

But I still wish it didn’t have to happen. Even when what life there is is full of suffering and pain without the redemption of joy and triumph. But I suppose, mercifully in those circumstances, Death does happen.

I’m still twirling the idea over and over in my mind.

There are few ties that bind me to this mortal coil. While I know there are a handful of people out there who love me and would care if I keeled over, or if I offed myself, I can’t help but feel that I’m missing something. Other than family and long-time friends, other than a sense of duty to my profession, and perhaps a pathological sense of curiosity that I haven’t yet managed to suppress, there’s a sense of emptiness. I’ve tried hedonism, I’ve tried distraction, I’ve even tried asceticism, and this hole still lingers. Perhaps nowhere near as painfully as before, but it’s still there. There is a void that my fragile paper-thin life seems to collapse upon.

I’ve given up on hoping that someone would magically fill this void for me. I know, deep down inside, that it’s up to me. If I never find the kind of love that I think is what I need, than I’ll have to do with the love that I do have. There are my parents. My brother and my sister. And hopefully some day, my nieces and my nephews. There are my dear friends, and a few new friends along the way. It’s something with which to fill the void with, even if only partially.

*sigh*

We don’t always get what we want, and perhaps fulfillment is ultimately a utopian fantasy of youth, something that I will perhaps gladly shed some day. Still, even still, it would be nice to have someone at my side on this long, slow journey to that finish line that I know awaits me somewhere down the road.

But like I said, I guess there’s always the hospital. At least I needn’t die alone.

Man, Lee Smolin, theoretical physicist to the nth degree, is my hero. The first I had heard of him was his book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, a discussion of the possible unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity, which covers string theory and loop quantum gravity. I also noted his name in João Magueijo’s book Faster than the Speed of Light.

Smolin’s recent book is The Trouble with Physics, which is a history of grand unification, a critique on string theory, and a critique on the sociology of academia. He is straight up with the dearth of minorities and women getting tenure (something that was all too evident even in the social sciences and humanities when I was at college [see Oscar Campomanes, Enrique Bonus, Amando Cabeza].) He talks about the way that the old-boys network functions, and how faculty hiring at universities is determined:

Even in these frank exchanges, you seldom hear really negative comments. When people have nothing good to report, they will often just say, “Let’s move on. I’d rather not comment” or something mild like “I’m not excited.” But there are times when the mere mention of a name invokes an “Absolutely not!” or “Don’t go there” or “Are you kidding?” or the definitive “Over my dead body!” In my experience, in every such instance the candidate fell into one and often two of the following three categories: They were (1) female, (2) not white, and/or (3) someone inventing his or her own research program rather than following the mainstream. There are of course women and nonwhites who elicit no objections. But, again in my experience, these are cases where the candidate hews tightly to an established research program.

There is heated debate among physicists over why there are not more women or blacks in physics, compared with other fields just as challenging, such as mathematics or astronomy. I believe the answer is simple: blatant prejudice. Anyone who has served, as I have, on decades of hiring committees and hasn’t seen naked prejudice in action is either blind to it or dishonest. There are rules and ethics of confidentiality that prevent me from giving examples, but there are several detailed studies that tell the story. (page 336 of the hardcover edition)

(See, for example, “A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT,” vol. XI, no. 4, March 1999…. More information on issues on women in science is available from the American Physical Society… and from the committee on Faculty Diversity at Harvard University….) (page 371 of the hardcover edition)

(Emphasis mine.)

Smolin goes on to talk about how in his experience, affirmative action was never about elevating someone unqualified above others who were. In a tight competition where there is no easy way to judge who should be chosen, this is the only time that affirmative action makes a difference. Like Chris Rock says, “I don’t think I should get accepted to a school over a white person if I get a lower mark on a test. But if there’s a tie? Fuck him! Shit, you had a 400-year head start, motherfucker!”

(Another Chris Rock quote that I think is applicable: “A black C student can’t run no fucking company. A black C student can’t even be the manager of Burger King. Meanwhile, a white C student just happens to be the president of the United States of America!” This is the type of unfairness that affirmative action is trying to remedy. It was never about letting underprivileged minority kids with Ds and Fs into college ahead of the white and Asian kids with As and Bs. It’s about the black and brown kids with 4.0 GPAs but no honors or AP classes because their school didn’t have enough funding for them, who without affirmative action would never get into college because all the spots get taken by white and Asian kids from affluent schools (with sometimes massive grade inflation), with their GPAs of 5.0 because of the 6 honors and AP classes they’re in. Can you really believe that these kids with 5.0s are necessarily going to do better or work harder than these kids with 4.0s? And consider, underprivileged minorities are unlikely to be able to get junior out of academic probation by donating a building like some of these rich folks can. And don’t tell me that never happens.)

So I’m tired of hearing the “level playing field” bullshit, and the stupid idea that racism is over. Most rich people I know didn’t get where they are because of “merit” They damn well inherited their privilege, and don’t try to tell me otherwise.

Days like this I feel like I am trapped in some kind of existential loop, a la “Groundhog Day,” forced to live and relive excruciatingly painful parts of my life. I suppose it is simply the fact that I really haven’t learned any of the lessons I was supposed to have learned, so I haven’t really learned to avoid these situations that make me want to weep, and maybe even sometimes writhe in agony.

So for some bizarre reason today, my thoughts strayed to the movie “Donnie Darko,” of which I’d written about some time ago (and since it is quite the non-linear narrative, and if you don’t have the time or patience to actually watch it, wikipedia has a pretty good synopsis, including commentary from the director which I wasn’t aware of before.

As you may have guessed from the allusions in my intro, this movie discusses temporal loops, or more specifically, pocket universes. As the director explains, what happens is that a tangent universe spontaneously arises from the pre-existing timeline. Unfortunately, most tangent universes are extraordinarily unstable, and this one happens to have a finite lifespan of 28 days. The goal of the protagonist is to close off the tangent universe before it destabilizes and destroys the pre-existing timeline.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, there is the allusion to “The Last Temptation of Christ”. Given my recently ramblings-on regarding religion [1][2], perhaps this is the thread that my mind chased.

Interestingly, another time-loop I have been obsessed with is Phillip K Dick’s conceptualization of the Black Iron Prison, which, briefly, is Dick’s concept that a tangent universe arose sometime shortly after the Death of Christ, and which continued until the Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace. So Dick acknowledges the existence of this time-loop by stating that “The Empire never ended,” which can be taken to mean the Roman Empire specifically, but can be easily read to include all forms of state-sponsored tyranny. (Of note, one can say that the U.S. is the heir of the Roman Empire through two routes: the British and the Spanish, which were both great empires in their day, and which were once provinces of Rome) It is somewhat disquieting to see that the spirit of Nixon doesn’t seem to be completely defeated, and apparently lives on in the current Bush administration, but that is a topic for another blog post.

In any case, the trigger to collapse the tangent universe is the destruction of the Empire, which, despite Dick pinning it to Nixon’s fall, may still be some time in the future. Until then, we essentially live in an unreal world stuck in apostolic times, still waiting for the Second Coming™

But I kind of wonder if the First Coming wasn’t itself a way to collapse a tangent universe. What if Jesus Christ had to die by the Cross so that we wouldn’t be stuck in a temporal loop caused by Adam and Eve’s (and Satan’s) Sin of Pride? What if that is what the Old Testament is? A narrative of the tangent universe, the Unreal universe, in which reality is distorted, in which God is misrepresented and the Original Sin™ is obscured?

Interestingly, these Gnostic ideas pervade “The Matrix”, which is perhaps the only redeeming quality of the sequels, but I digress.

But I don’t know, I guess I’ve also been mulling over the nature of time for a while now. In simplistic terms, it is ever the conflict between the Western idea of linear time and the Eastern idea of cyclic time, and much like the dual wave-particle nature of matter, the reality is probably that time is both linear and cyclic.

It is interesting that the reason why the Western idea is sometimes decried is because of its effect on colonial thinking and the way it touches upon the concept of the White Man’s Burden. The idea of linear time (in the Victorian Age that was obsessed with the Great Chain of Being) was that time meant “progress” and advancement, which many interpreted as meaning “primitive” is “bad,” and “modern” is “good,” something which this post-modern age proves to be wrong. (Can we say impending nuclear apocalypse, global warming, perturbed weather patterns, non-sustainable urban growth and development, chemical and biologic warfare, designer illicit substances?) In truth, linear time in of itself does not necessarily bear any of these connotations, but if you contextualize it within humanities and social sciences, this is what you end up conveying.

So. Time is in many ways cyclic. History is doomed to repeat itself. And yet, and yet, Time continues to run out.

I was walking through the Science Fiction and Fantasy section of the Borders in Glendale when a totally random thought occurred to me. I think what brought it to my mind is the question: what is the cause of evil? I was flipping through random fantasy novels where characters are neatly pigeon-holed into Good or Evil, and clearly in the real world nothing is that obvious.

And since I was born and raised Roman Catholic, I had no choice but to go back to my roots, and when you look at the Genesis and various apocrypha regarding Lucifer, it becomes quite clear that the first and the second sin is Pride.

I think that Islam makes it even more explicit that this is the sin of Iblis, and I think John Milton catches this sentiment very well in the line from Paradise Lost: “Better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven.”

So Satan’s rejection of God is the first sin: a sin borne of Pride, of thinking that you understand the pattern of the Universe better than anyone else. And so is Adam and Eve’s disobedience with regards to eating the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Some argue that they thought that they could usurp the knowledge of God themselves, once again demonstrating the attitude that they think they know better than anyone else.

And I think that this is a pretty accurate depiction of where Evil comes from: the unbending, insolent insistence that you of all people know exactly what the right thing to do is, and that everyone else is dead wrong.

You see this kind of sin well-evident in some Christian fundamentalists who insist that they hold the only key to salvation and that everyone else is just damned, not to mention their Islamic fundamentalist counterparts who will actually kill other people in the name of God, which is the ultimate blasphemy if you ask me. You see this level of arrogance in the Bush Administration, who, despite continuous setbacks and failures, simply refuse to admit that they made a mistake and that they are wrong.

The irony is that this kind of sinful pride is exactly what Jesus Christ rails against in the Gospels. He constantly mocks the Saducees and the Pharisees who insist that they are righteous and uphold the laws of God and would rather destroy Christ and his followers than admit to the possibility that there are other ways. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if Fundamentalist Christians and greedy Republicans who claim to be Christian simply read a different Bible than I do.

Now maybe it’s misleading to call this sin “Pride” since the term actually has quite a few connotations in English. After all, you are supposed to be proud of yourself and your accomplishments, right? And it’s equally misleading to use the term “Shame,” which, while related, has a completely different connotation in English.

In Tagalog, the word hiya, while commonly translated as “shame,” probably better encompasses what I’m trying to say. One can also translate hiya as “shyness,” or perhaps even “humility.” This relates to a common Tagalog phrase that is used to deride another person: walang hiya, commonly translated as “without shame,” but probably more accurately meaning “without humility.” I know you can say the phrase “without humility” in English just as well, but it simply doesn’t have the negative connotation that walang hiya has. Being walang hiya is considered a definite character fault.

And so I can’t help but agree that Pride itself is the cause of all Evil in the world. As soon as someone begins to believe that they are the end-all, be-all of all answers, that they havev the Final Solution™, all sorts of hell breaks loose.

Which touches upon a pet topic of mine: the mistaken identification of Faith with Certainty. I remember this lesson well, which was given to me in high school by the Jesuits. Faith is not Certainty. Faith is about Doubt. If you cannot experience Doubt, than you cannot have Faith. Faith is never about knowing exactly what is going to happen next. It is precisely about not knowing, and perhaps about being afraid of the future, and yet still trusting to God that whatever needs to be will happen.

Or, to put it more succinctly, if you think you know all the answers, then what do you need God for?

And notice that it has nothing to do about everything turning out all right. Some of the most Faithful men and women in human history have outright been violated and massacred, and yet I do not think this at all degrades the nature of their Faith in God, nor God’s Faith in them. It all comes down to Jesus praying in the Garden at Gethsemane (Matthew 26:39): “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want, but as You want.” This is the core of Faith, to put your life in God’s hands, even if it might mean being tortured and killed for doing what you think is right.

The Fundamentalists and religious extremists, the terrorists and the Bush Administration show none of this character of humility, and frankly, every time they talk about God, I feel they are outright blaspheming.

But what do I know.

Interestingly, the only Fantasy writer I’ve read who explicitly uses the Sin of Pride as the Source of All Evil is J.R.R. Tolkien. Now, this is probably not surprising since he was Catholic. Morgoth is clearly his interpretation of Satan. But it is interesting how many of his characters fall in The Lord of the Rings. Saruman starts believing more in his own craft and wisdom than in his mission for the Valar. Denethor trusts more to the foresight he gleans from the palantir than he does in the strength of his own people. Boromir is undone because he thinks that he can actually wield the One Ring against Sauron. All these people fall from grace because they think that they know exactly what the right thing to do is, trusting to their own devices instead of understanding their context in the world. Sauron himself falls precisely because of the folly of his own pride, unable to countenance the idea that his enemy would send such humble folk as hobbits into his land to destroy the One Ring rather than try to wield it against him. Then of course there are the Sins of Pride committed by both Elves and Men as depicted in The Silmarillion: Fëanor’s doom-laden Oath to retrieve the Silmarils at all cost in defiance of the Valar, destroying anyone in his way, even if it meant killing his own kin, and Ar-Pharazon’s attempt to land in Aman with the thought of wresting immortality from the Valar.

Now I lie, the two other major fantasy series that I’ve read Memory, Thorn, and Sorrow by Tad Williams and The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan likewise touch upon the Sin of Pride as the Source of All Evil. However, Williams’ world of Osten Ard is essentially a transcription of real-world human cultures to geography resembling Middle Earth, although his character of Ineluki the Storm King, who defied the rules of Nature in order to destroy his enemies at the cost of the lives of his kin and his own soul, is rather interesting. The Creation of the Sword Sorrow seems to be a rather nice allegory to the creation of nuclear weapons, although I would not accuse Williams of being intentionally allegorical. (The same allegory charge has been made with regard to Tolkien’s One Ring, which he vehemently denied.) And while Jordan’s story of the Westlands has become mired in such complexity far rivalling and far more tangled than Tolkien’s lucid intricacies, Sha’itan is simply a very thinly veiled version of Satan himself.

Then there is Ursula Le Guin’s completion of her Earthsea Cycle with The Other Wind. Le Guin prefers to keep Evil more realistic, and never relegates its Source to a single focal point like how most fantasy writers do. And given the Taoistic aura of Earthsea, Le Guin is more interested in discussing disorder and imbalance, from which both Evil and Good may arise. Still, the greatest source of disorder and imbalance in the world is again caused by a transgression of Pride, with Wizards attempting to obtain immortality by cheating the Dragons, and ending up perverting the very nature of Life and Death instead.

Now I don’t claim to be a holy person myself. The judgements I render are the judgements of a flawed person. And I realize that there are plenty of problems with living continuously in a sea of uncertainty. Sinful pride is unfortunately often confused with simple confidence, and without at least some confidence, it is extremely difficult to live in this world.

Interestingly, science itself however agrees with reality as being, by its nature uncertain. Despite Einstein’s wishful thought that “God does not play with dice,” the elucidation of the principles of quantum mechanics as embodied by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle makes it quite obvious that it is not within our abilities to determine the exact state of reality. We can’t even be completely sure about things in completely theoretical realms, thanks to Gödel’s theorem of incompleteness.

Which simply leads me to this conclusion: Beware of anyone who is too sure of themself. Healthy amounts of doubt should be considered a virtue (although I agree that radical skepticism has its profound limitations.) Anyone without doubt should be watched closely, since they are likely to commit quite Evil acts in the name of Good.

Of course, even in my lifetime, it has become obvious that not enough people understand or even know history to prevent it from repeating itself. (As George Santayana notes: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”) But I suppose all we can do is hope.

The vagaries of consciousness? Or quantum mechanical effects?

From Boingboing, this article discusses a neat trick of being able to slow down or stop the second hand outright. The question is: is this just a glitch in the core visual systems of the human brain? Or is this quantum uncertainty acting in a macroscopic context?

Coincidentally, I am reading Chronos by Etienne Klein (who is, however, no relation to Felix Klein, the inventor of the Klein Bottle, nor to Oscar Klein, the co-creator of Kaluza-Klein Theory.) which discusses this very thing—whether our experiences of time—subjective time—are merely artifacts of our cognitive hardware, or whether the weirdness we sense is really our interaction with quantum mechanics and in fact reflects physical time. Is our role as the quantum mechanical Observer what creates time? Are we the actual “engines of time”? Would time not exist if there were no Observer? (Although, I suppose, nothing would exist if there were no Observer.)

With these thoughts at hand, I thought I would add a snippet of lyrics from the Police:

A connecting principle Linked to the invisible Almost imperceptible Something inexpressible Science insusceptible Logic so inflexible Causally connectible Yet nothing is invincible —The Police “Synchronicity I”