on the emergence and immersion of geniuses

R. Buckminster Fuller is an American architect who is known for patenting the geodesic dome design, and for the discovery of the carbon allotrope which is his namesake. He is - probably more accurately - known for the saying; "everyone is born a genius. Society de-geniuses them."

I think that Fuller's own history is a perfect example of his claim. I also agree strongly with this particular statement. For instance, the C60 allotrope known as the Buckyball or Buckminsterfullerene was actually discovered by Robert Kurl, Sir Harold Koto and Richard Smalley in 1985 . Their 1996 Nobel Prize gives these men their due credit, but in the limpid word of chemistry, the R. Buckminster Fuller is wrongly assumed to be a chemist, and the discoverer of Buckminsterfullerene. The point I aim to make here is that Fuller was incontestably a genius, but he is not known as such for the correct reasons.

Socioeconomic evolution has imbued the term "genius" with melange of defining characteristics with which I don't agree. Before I get in too deep with this assertion, I should clarify that I define genius as one whose unique curiosities become manifest. That's it. Psychometrics has tried admirably to find a way to assess intelligence on a relative scale, allowing the siting of geniuses and savants as they arise. In as much as these tests do have some value to designing our current educational system (with which I also have major discordance), they also serve as a societal breech to the acceptance of the creativity from which genius comes.

I am inclined toward the idea that genius emerges from reaching outside of paradigms, and happens independently of academic guidance. Fuller's genius is identifiable in his childhood endeavors into original architecture, tool design and novel propulsion methods; he was twice expelled from Harvard. Nikola Tesla invented the first paddle-less water wheel at the age of 4; he spent 1 term at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague. Francisco Goya; the last of the Old Masters and the first of the Modern. Mozart and Galileo... all geniuses oppressed or quelled by economic demand, marketing and immersion into societal constructs.

I supposed this is my way of letting out some steam from the pneumatic build up of my anxiety and ambivalent contention for graduate school.

I prefer to hope that I have something unique to offer the world of intellect and scientific discovery. While I was never a prodigal child, and have most definitely been the product of academia-induced ADD-promulgated study, there is still a chance that some modicum of genius might arise in the later stages of my own evolution.

In short, it is my profound hope that I am playing out Fuller's apothegm in reverse - that I have first been de-geniused by society, and am now in the midst of my journey toward emergence.

chris kelly + the constitution

On August 4th, the day before President Obama's birthday, Chris Kelly, a writer for the Bill Maher show, wrote a piece on the authenticity of our president as determined by our Constitution, and on the practicality of our Constitution. (that was a commariffic sentence!)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-kelly/the-constitution-says-oba_b_249730.html

I love the Huffington Post, and I love its impressive array of contributors.

When interpretation is called into question, I almost immediately become bored, feeling that the inherent flaws in relying on interpretation as truth is fragmenting and destructive in itself. There is no direct or obvious interpretation of anything, and so the subject of flawed interpretation is spoiled and dull.

However. I was inspired to propose a response to Kelly's article (to be interpreted as one would perceive Kelly's article). I think that the United States Constitution should be rewritten on a quarterly basis. And by quarterly, I of course mean every 25 years. Additionally, if nobody wants obfuscated avenues of potential conclusion, shouldn't the Constitution be written as a series of premises? "This, That, Therefore such and such at such and such a time, place and intensity." Eh?

I say 25 years because really, how much social evolution can take place in less than that time? The emergence of each new generation seems like the appropriate time to reevaluate norms. The kind of growth that requires a reformation of the nature of the rules is really of a greater ilk than what happens on an annual scale. For instance, the results of great legal cases (which are the brunt of what determine amendments to our current Constitution) should be considered every 25 years, and a consensus should be taken as to which should be implemented in the the Constitution and contribute to the growth of National Law.

How much easier this would be. The clarity - the insane acceptibility. The absence of religious tongue-tying and the degree of misrepresentation and misconstrued allusion! I think the Constitution should be written for toddlers. Clearly, this is the only way the United States will be able to agree with itself as to "what the fathers wanted". Come, now... WE are now the fathers. We beget the carriers of the next stage of humanity's evolution. We are building for posterity. Let us build on foundations that will uphold our direction and progress, not the rickety and wizened inspirations that allowed our nation to become what we have.

This being said, there is a reason I never went into politics. Call me an elitist - I prefer for the decisions to be made my people who actually understand what is going on, what is implied and what is realistic. The populous should be responsible for finding someone trustworthy, and for communicating concerns at a State level. Beyond that, please oh please let the politicians decide whether Obama is trying to kill our grandmothers or not. I hate town halls. If you're going to lobby (and don't be mistaken - I certainly have done my share), please do so in a polite and intelligent fashion. Picketing is for children and hippies.

penrose + consciousness

Sir Roger Penrose is one of my favorite fellows. He's a mathematician who uses his intelligence to design obscure puzzle patterns simultaneously denying the emergence of consciousness from a pattern for god's sake - what more could you want in a man?

He uses an entire book - Shadows of the Mind (the "sequel" to The Emperor's New Mind) - to discuss how consciousness can't arise from a consistent mathematical system. He begins, essentially, with E=mc2: a number of superposed quantum states in the brain "work" until there is a gravitational difference between their energy and mass. The gravitational significance of this difference causes the states to collapse - or unfold - into one. This single conglomerate state then becomes one observable in the gross physical world - as an action potential in a neuron, perhaps.

At this point, Penrose would seem to agree with David Bohm's implicate order: actuality is the result of probabilistic collapses/unfolding of quantum and subquantum states. We observe light similarly. When medium of a laser absorbs particular wavelenths of light, the electrons of its atoms elevate to their highest state of energy. When so many electrons are excited to this high energy state (population inversion), they collapse together to a lower energy level which results in the emission of light, an observable condition created from a quantum conglomeration.

I have always been somewhat fearful of humanity's discovering the substrate of consciousness and applying it to artificial intelligence. It is comforting that Penrose agrees with me (!) that we will not be able to design A.I. with consciousness in the foreseeable future because it's something we are not nearly close enough to understaning, not to mention being able to coalesce and manipulate.

It is possible to suggest, then, that the connect between consciousness and brain is a physiological exploitation of the vast magnitude of activity in collapsed quantum states. This "non-algorithmic ingredient", as Penrose coins it, also jives with Bohm's suggestions of probability's role in the playing-out of the quantum universe in the gross or actual universe. Could we give our fatty brains such credit as to be the medium by which quantum states become consciousness? This is a question Penrose explores in The Emperor's New Mind, and which I will not dare attempt to disect.

Not at the moment, anyway.

More to come, then.

piaget + bohm

When we are infantile, we perceive the world in terms of transformations and continuity. When someone's head disappears behind the playpen wall, it no longer exists. And when someone's arms extend from behind a tree trunk, they are part of that tree trunk. And when that tree appears fairy-sized beside our hand, it is not because the tree is far away, but because you have discovered its untouchable miniature right in our presence. A thing happens to us between this time and adulthood that morphs that cononical perception into an interspersed mass of objects and interactions. Language.

Particularly Indo-European languages (English, French, German, etc.) are primarily based on nouns. We think, communicate and perceive based on what language has done to our interaction with the world. We fragment its natural cohesion just by the way we behold it.

Language was once verb-based... transformation-based. Native American languages, Bengali and other endangered linguistics. These were also peoples who interacted with reality as if it were all actualized in the same condition, and from the same piece of cloth and ultimately still cohesive.

inexhaustible matter

descartes. the man. cogito ergo sum, etc... the dualist.

the nature of matter, he thought, is to expand itself to occupy space and thus be susceptible to physical examination. the nature of the mind is to think. the defining characteristics of these actualities being so isolated, he surmised, they must function entirely individually. and hence consecrated was the mind-body problem.

and if matter and mind are monistic content of the larger whole?

if matter is infinite such that on many levels it is strongly influenced by consciousness, does it not follow that matter and mind may be more highly interactive than our intellectual paradigm allows?

alright. so i blogged eons ago about what it might mean if microtubules were the carriers of consciousness, and communicated by replicative and epigenetic phenomena with DNA. this remains a feasible possibility to me, but i no longer have reason to believe that microtubules and DNA would be the only instance of this mind-matter causality.

if we one day exhume that matter is inexhaustible, then it becomes plausible that mind intervenes its manifestation and directs it. which is not to say that a cup of jello might appear in the hand of a mind that desires it, or that any massive physicality would arise instantaneously. rather, i think it stands to reason that such a relationship would suggest dialectical movement's role in evolution. of everything.

of electromagnetic fields, of life, of geological shifts, of societal constructions and destructions.

societal thought invades a level of materialism that begets a communal EM field which allows the society to move harmoniously while maintaining the presence of its individuals. like plasma.

universal thought invades a level of materialism that commands a shift in organelle function in a species that causes its evolution and simultaneously the subtle evolution of everything with which it interacts.

humanity builds itself on the "shoulders of giants", or rather, their mistakes. have we not always done so at the command of collective consciousness? do inventors not materialize thoughts in response to communal misgivings? do physicists not seek to explain the existence of the world based on the way that our societies now function (or flounder, rather)? and the problems we seek to eliminate in finding the rational answer to the biggest question of them all? if we one day understand the rational of matter, will we not also comprehend our own existence and, in so doing, realize the key to our own harmonious existence?

here is my confound. i do not believe in god, and i do not believe that the universe exists at the will of humanity or its delusioned elitism. without human directive, what is universal thought explained by if not god? where does it come from? the collective minds of every eletron in existence? the Higgs boson?

the only way i can fix this dissonance is by imagining that mind and consciousness it itself something infinite that we as of yet have no means to address. and by that i am comforted enough to sleep at night. killer.

plasma + marxism

A cyclotron accelerator strips atoms of their outer electrons, leaving them with a positive charge. The resulting melange of free electrons and positively charges atoms is called plasma.

Plasma functions in a collective way, oscillating as a whole, yet its components move freely and individually. When two electrons are completely isolated, they maintain an interaction over a long distance. But in a plasma, this long-range interaction is shielded by the presence of an astronomical number of additional particles. Because this demands that all particle interactions become short range, electrons move freely within the collective, with individual movements.

The long-range interaction, however, has not completely vanished. Rather, its shadowed impetus is what allows the plasma to behave coherently.

--

If a society could behave like a plasma, an ideal balance between serving oneself and one's community would emerge. Capitalism brags that it achieves this balance of perfect individual freedom experienced while serving the common good. Pragmatically speaking, however, capitalism exists only in the hope that service to the common good might somehow be fomented from claustrophobic nests of self-committed individuals.

Limitation is a creation of the mind.

Explain the meaning of the statement above. Describe a specific situation in which limitation may, in fact, be quite realistic. Discuss what you think determines when limitation is real and when it is an illusion created by ones psyche.

There is a sturdy platform bridged between the concept of motivation and the achievements it fosters. In the spirit of optimism, there is a school of thought where the only obstacles between oneself and said achievements are the illusions self-created out of doubt and fear. Painting achievement in this light, it is certain that once confidence reigns anything is possible. Unfortunately, there are circumstances in which limitation is quite real, and emerges in a physical form independent of human confidence.

We will examine the case of a young prospective medical student determined to embark on the ravaging adventure of an MSTP dual degree. Wide eyed, and naive of the particular tolls this endeavor will take on her body and mind, she allows herself to be swept into a realm of fantasy in which all the agonizing training is over. She is the proud and excited principle investigator of a neurodegenerative diseases laboratory where multiple studies are undertaken based on the peculiarities she sees in her diagnostically impossible patients. It was all very well worth it, she thinks - now being in her mid-thirties and about to spring a small family into operation, Boxer puppy and all. The limitations were nowhere to be seen; simple incorrigible self-motivation drove her through eight years of MSTP and three more of residency with but a few bouts of fatigue and scratches to her otherwise-intact ego. She got through it all believing that her only limitations were those she imposed on herself through doubt, self-degradation and fear of incompetence. All of these were easily over-ridden by stepping aside to remind herself of her dreams and her ability to see their fruition. ...right?

Well, sadly there are several real limitations to ones ability to succeed in such endeavors. It is not always the case that young prospectives like our optimistic case study can nullify the limitations of their minds with pep-talks and meditation. There are cases where limitation is not illusion, but reality. Our young prospective MSTP student neglected to inform you that she suffers from Crohn's disease and IBS, two conditions which render her indisposed for up to two days at a time at unpredictable frequency. She did not mention that the numbers by which she was to be assessed in qualification for the MSTP dual degree were unformidable, and by no means set her application aglow. She refused to admit to herself that her intelligence was an obstacle, and she refused to resign to her health as a legitimate hole in her stairway to paradise. These, however, were real limitations. It was, in fact, their neglect that was the self-imposed illusion. And so, the young prospective MSTP student was forced to re-enter the present time and condition in order to assess on a more grounded level whether her limitations were real or surmountable.

She remains in limbo, ruminating over and over the possible outcomes of strength of spirit versus strength of body and intellect. It is here where limitation becomes real and must be faced with the understanding that a different stairway may need to be built in order to ascend to that golden future amongst glowing MD-PhDs and their radiating achievements.

Writing Sample #1
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