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.

We all want the good guys to win. Most major religions prophesy that Good™ will triumph in the end, even against overwhelming odds, even if it seems that most folks are playing for the dark side.

But you gotta remember, Good™ is always the side that wins. History (and prophecy) are always written by the winner. No one really knows jack shit about anything unless you were actually there, and then usually not even then.

And it’s in the best interest of the people you want to win to claim that they are actually going to win. Because until that prophecy comes true or is proven false, in some unspecified time in the murky future, there’s no way to tell ahead of time. How do you know that it’s actually going to come true? How do you know that they’re not just saying that to keep morale up?

How do we know that the Right People™ will actually win? How do we know that the prophecies aren’t all mixed around and screwed up? I think that the fact of the matter is that we don’t.

That’s why we call it faith. If we knew for sure, it wouldn’t be a matter of faith. It would be a matter of fact.

And unless you’re a hard core solipsist who doubts that anything actually exists, it’s redundant and unnecessary to believe in fact. It just is. Even if you disbelieve it, it won’t go away.

Now, I’ve been struggling with the whole “If God is good, why does he allow evil to happen?” question for several years now, and every so often, I come up with something that is temporarily satisfying. Nothing ever really sticks, though. It’s all nebulous and immaterial. It doesn’t predict anything. It’s ultimately a fairy tale that helps me sleep at night, that’s all.

So my current scenario is this: maybe God really does exist, is unquestionably good, and is omnipotent to boot. But he’s got a lot of bad guys going for him. They’ve got him in a stalemate in heaven. In the end, he could always win, by obliterating the universe and starting all over again, but he doesn’t want to do that. Because that means destroying us. And, in the greater scheme of things, us not existing is a far worse scenario than us existing, but suffering. But maybe, because of the stalemate in heaven, Good and Evil make a deal. No nuclear options. You don’t mess around with creation, and we don’t bomb it back to the Big Bang. That’s the deal that God and the bad guys make. So God is forced to do things on the down-low, behind Evil’s backs, in slow and subtle ways.

The problem is that, because God is Good™, she can’t just go around making promises to the Bad Guys and then breaking them. Even though she knows that they wouldn’t think twice about breaking promises they made to her. I mean, what’s the point of being Good™ if you do the same things that Evil™ does? That’s why there’s a war in the first place. (This is also the reason that the War on Terror™ is a pointless endeavor if we end up surrendering our civil liberties and commit war crimes. What’s the point of pretending that we’re the Good Guys if we end up doing the same things the Bad Guys do?)

So God’s hands are tied by the fact that God must be virtuous.

And yet Evil can’t win, because if they try to wreck Creation, God will then no longer have any incentive not to nuke the universe and start over. And they’re not powerful enough to actually overcome God.

Again, it’s a stalemate.

So it occurs to me that that’s probably why God isn’t going around making sure that no one is suffering, and that everyone gets their heart’s desire. Because this is War, man. God’s got a lot of other problems to deal with right now, and your sad pathetic ass is the least of her worries.

Bad Things™ happen because the only alternative would be non-existence. It’s a tough call. Especially if I were constrained to always doing the Right Thing™.

It also occurred to me that my spiritual cosmology is riddled by Tolkienisms. My concept of the Eternal Struggle Between Good and Evil™ is basically cribbed off The Lord of the Rings. Evil, represented by Sauron, is nearly completely omnipotent, and holds sway over almost the entire world. He’s got control of Balrogs and Dragons and almost infinite armies of Orcs. If not for the fact that Good™ always wins, smart money should be on Sauron to win. The odds are overwhelming. Good, represented by Frodo Baggins, has no magical powers, is physically weak, is frequently frightened, is easily wounded and maimed, and in the end pretty much fails completely. It is only an act of Grace™ that saves the day.

I think that Phillip K Dick’s cosmology is similarly constructed. Evil (in the guise of Richard M Nixon George W Bush Ferris F Fremont and the military-industrial complex) pretty much rules the entire world, and only a few people actually remain free. Only the weak, the oppressed, the suffering remain in opposition to Global Capitalism Evil, and they are easily imprisoned, destroyed, and otherwise neutralized. And yet, somehow, Good manages to win out, just barely, and probably just temporarily.

But the Act of Grace™ is important. If Bilbo actually did kill Gollum way back when, then it would’ve been all over. Frodo’s failure would’ve been complete, and Evil would’ve triumphed. It wasn’t power or force that won the day. It was doing the Right Thing™ An act of mercy. An act of compassion. What the Bad Guys call “weakness.”

But if you don’t have mercy or compassion, then you’re playing for the other side.

Retrospect teaches us that doing the Right Thing™ doesn’t always mean that we’ll be rewarded. A lot of times, we actually get punished. Frodo ends up suffering because Bilbo did the Right Thing. Why is this? It’s because Evil is a lot more powerful than Good, and they hold a lot of the top positions. But overwhelming force doesn’t always win. (Just look at Iraq. And Vietnam before that.) So if we have faith, if we have hope, then we’ve got to do the Right Thing™, come hell or high water.

I guess that’s the way all our myths and legends are constructed. The Good Guys almost lose completely, and yet somehow in the end manage to pull it off against overwhelming odds. Maybe it’s because the world really *is* constructed this way.

No one ever won fame, fortune, power, or renown by doing the Right Thing. I’m of the opinion that most normal human beings are actually pretty good at understanding what the Right Thing is in the majority of situations. But most of us don’t do it because it almost never gets us to where we want to go.

So that’s where the battle lies. Think for yourself. Recognize that you really do know what you should do. And when you choose otherwise, remember that you did choose it. We always have a choice. The consequences may not be pleasant, but we always have a choice.

that which you seek to perfect
fussing and worrying over
will come to ruin
too much force
and the thing will break
too much care
and you will wear it thin
and all you’re left with are the little pieces
useless debris, detritus

so if you wish for things to turn out well
abandon artifice
let go of regret
the thing you care about
if it truly is worth caring about
is no mere tool
but an entity unto itself
it too has a soul
and souls are most perfect
when they are tranquil and still

and in stillness, what must happen will happen
the wave shall lift you up, then drop you down
and even still, you will find yourself
moving to where you need to be

In the Western model of education, there is an operational distinction between physics and metaphysics. The former gets you grants from the Department of Defense, and opens doors to working at NASA or JPL. You get to work with nuclear reactors and supercolliders and fusion bombs and Einstein-Bose condensates. The latter is stereotyped as the demesne of hippies trapped in the 1960s and undergrads who have no idea what they want to do with their lives. Generally, the discipline is called philosophy and not metaphysics, but a rose is a rose. You know you’re pretty marginal when even the social science and humanities people look at you with that “What the hell do you do?” look in their eyes.

What is strange is that this was not always so. When the Roman Catholic Church held sway over the Western world, physics and metaphysics were the same thing. If you think about it, it makes a hell of a lot of sense. Even in this present day, physicists expend a huge amount of effort into trying to figure out (1) where everything comes from and (2) where everything goes. In other words, a Theory of Everything™. The current incarnation of the most popular theory out there is called M-theory, where the M could easily stand for “meta.” The more popular nomenclature is String Theory, and it’s really just contemporary metaphysics dressed up with the trappings of mathematics since none of it is in a testable state at this time.

But I’m not here to argue semantics, nor really discuss the curious divide between hard science and philosophy.

What started me on this tack is going to midnight mass on Christmas.

If you’ve been following this blog for any amount of time, you may recall me mentioning I’ve been in a terrible crisis of faith since 2001. I was born and raised Roman Catholic, was baptised, participated in the Eucharist, and was Confirmed. I attended a parochial elementary school and junior high, and went to an all-boys high school run by Jesuits. Even all through college and most of med school, I still went to mass every Sunday.

And then a bunch of lunatic-fringe Muslims hijacked a few planes and crashed them into the WTC and the Pentagon.

This is not where everything went to shit quite yet.

We all know that religious fundamentalists are scary people who need to be quarantined and maybe even euthanized. Right? Right? I mean, it’s not surprising that a bunch of whack jobs would do such a thing, right?

That’s where I part company with most of the Western world, I guess.

The sad thing is that what we really have to chose between are Islamic psychos and the Christian fascists. Religious fundamentalists are going to destroy the world, and there is nothing we can do to stop them.

Despite my training in Western science, and despite the disappointments I’ve suffered from my faith, I still haven’t abandoned the idea that there might be a God after all. I seriously doubt that he/she is like the God described in the Old Testament, but I think that the possibility of the existence of an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient hyperintelligence is greater than zero, meaning that, given enough time in the universe, one or several are bound to occur.

I mean, I really doubt that the God that these sick fucks worship actually exists, but I still haven’t abandoned the idea that there might be some kind of Presence™ out there that is relatively benign, that may or may not take an interest in our little pale blue dot orbiting and unremarkable yellow sun in the backwaters of an unremarkable spiral galaxy sitting in the midst of an unremarkable galaxy cluster.

The fact that it’s a possibility that isn’t ruled out by the laws of physics nor the laws of thermodynamics means that atheism can’t be right, either. I think the only honest way to go without being overly dogmatic and ramming your beliefs down other people’s throats is to be agnostic. Wishy-washy maybe, but what if the Flying Spaghetti Monster really exists? What then?

Seriously, though, from the atheists that I’ve seen who are vocal on the Internet, it just seems like yet another religion from which you can exclude others and condemn them. Not really my taste, and if you can’t disprove the existence of an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient hyperintelligence, then how do you know what the truth is? You can’t. Simple as that.

Mind you, this is by far not an apologia for the raving lunatics who claim to have the keys to Salvation™. I think anyone who is dogmatic about anything but can’t prove their point with reproducible experiments should just shut the hell up and let people who have real talent get on with the business of discovering the inner workings of the universe. Anyone who thinks that they, and only they, know the truth is either selling something, or smoking something.

The reason I believe that omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent hyperintelligences may exist is the simple fact that we know matter can self-organize, and that self-organized matter can become intelligent (perhaps I’m using the word too loosely, but you get the picture.) And it so happens that some self-organized intelligent entities (read, human beings) are interested in trying to create artificial intelligences that have some or all of these capabilities. If AI is truly possible (and it is still an “if,” since we have yet to produce a program that can really pass the Turing Test), then it should follow that hyper-AI is also possible. While the only intelligent form of matter we know happens to consist of mostly carbon and uses a highly distributed network of networks of nanoprocessors (in other words, neurons organized into nuclei, organized into functional partitions in the brain) for computing tasks, operating in a mostly aqueous environment, we are, after all, actively trying to replicate or at least emulate this functionality on silicon. And if it can be done in silicon, why not in uranium or lanthanum? Why not in a 10,000 kelvin gas cloud with hydrogen nuclei and hydrogen nuclei encoding state and performing quantum calculations? Or in a network of quasars, in which gamma-ray bursts are analogous to the release of neurotransmitters in our brains?

So I think that it is still possible that something like a God may be out there, although I am rather certain that we have no idea what he/she/it is truly like.

In literature, such a creature is already well described. Charlie Stross describes The Eschaton, a highly distributed hyperintelligence inhabiting the galaxy, in his books Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise. And while the Eschaton may have limits, it seems pretty close to being omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient. Other distributed intelligences haunt the science fiction scene, like the Oracle and the Architect from the Matrix, Wintermute and Neuromancer from Neuromancer, Skynet from the Terminator Series. And while I have never read anything that Vernon Vinge wrote, I get the sense that he believes that our descendants are destined to evolve into similar creatures, for whom the vast vacuum of space is not a limit.

Arthur C Clarke’s laws always come back to me. The one I always remember is that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” If this is the case, how do we know that miracles can’t be explained scientifically? I think it’s because, in a lot of ways, the average human mind is lazy. Instead of wanting to find the truth, the human mind just wants a pretty story that they can use as an answer for whenever their actions are challenged. Just think of the times that real people have actually, sincerely, claimed that God made them do it. (And think of the mayhem and suffering most of these people have wreaked on the world at large. God’s name is definitely sullied by the never-ending line of cheaters, liars, bullies, and outright assholes who claim to have a direct hotline to the deity him/herself.)

But I stand by my belief that fundamentalists should be killed, incarcerated, brainwashed, or lobotomized. If we got rid of these fucks, we could probably end like 95% of the problems of humanity.

Level I

Not sure what exactly changed this evening, after I gave up with lying in bed, weary, defeated. Maybe it was the odd impulse to write this line on a random scrap of paper:

Let lightning strike me now!

Not sure what that’s supposed to mean either, but here we are.

Level II

The problem with existentialism (at least the Camusian variety) is that it doesn’t have any answers. It is, in a way, an anti-religion. (Although I am wary of saying that religion has any answers either.) Or, perhaps more accurately, it is a meta-religion.

Level III

I’m trying to find a satisfying explanation for the term religion. Like most -ion words in English, it’s from Latin, and [various sources][1] parse it to be re- and ligere or perhaps re- and legere.

Ligo, ligere, lixi, lictus, or perhaps ligo, ligare, ligavi, ligatus both mean “to bind,” and various Christian theologians use to illustrate the relationship between God and humanity. Interestingly, during the Roman Republic and then the Roman Empire, there was a governmental position known as the lictor who essentially seemed to serve as the bodyguard of anyone who held imperium. Lictor seems obviously derived from ligo, ligere, lixi, lictus, and may refer to the fasces, the “bundle” borne by the lictor, seemingly symbolizing imperium itself.

The fasces make me think of agriculture, and there is a lot to be said about the nature of someone who has the power to grow food, and how many early creation myths probably center around the harvest.

On the other hand, lego, legere, lexi, lectus is generally parsed as “to read” and it is where lex, “the law”, is derived from. Since the religions that Western Civilization are generally concerned with are all based on various sacred scripture, this would certainly fit as well. Legere can also be conjugated as lego, legere, legi, legatus, however, from whence legion is derived, and it means “to gather,” “to collect.” In this sense, religion can be seen as a collection of traditions.

When seen through a Christian perspective, the idea of gathering is very integral. One of the sacraments, Holy Communion, is based entirely on the notion of gathering together a community, and it is this sacrament that the Catholic Mass centers on.

Interestingly, the word lignum, meaning “wood”, also seems to be related. Whether this hearkens to some kind of tree worship (I immediately think of the Druids), or whether this is simply the fact that wood is something that is gathered remains to be discovered.

Level IV

Etymology non-withstanding, I was taught that “religion” meant “way of life” and therefore could be broadly applied to many philosophical systems that are actually deployed as solutions to the problems of existence, and thereby definitely including Eastern philosophies such as Taoism and Buddhism.

So what I mean by “metareligion” is that existentialism doesn’t describe a way of life, per se, but rather can encompass any and all religions. In other words, just because you believe in God doesn’t mean you can’t be existentialist, or probably more accurately, just because you’re an existentialist doesn’t mean you can’t believe in God.

Level V

But this was all a segue to the matter at hand: at some point, you’ve got to make a decision. You can’t just sit on that existentialist point of crisis for the rest of your life. Either you make a decision, or the universe makes the decision for you.

(As an aside, existential hell exists because you can always revisit that point of crisis, even when the decision has already been made, even when it was completely out of your control. Case in point, from time to time, I still think about the point of crisis I had about 10 years ago, when I decided to tell A how I felt about her. This memory can still wake me up with a cold sweat, and I think a part of my soul withered after that day.)

But what is gone is gone. What never was, shall never be, world without end.

Level VI

So filled with the energy of existential release, I set myself to work on decreasing the amount of entropy filling my apartment. I don’t understand why it’s so difficult for me to keep things in order. I suppose I just have too much stuff, and I would probably be well served by just throwing everything away.

One of these days, I may finally get everything into order, but it’s definitely not going to be any time soon.

[1]: http://www.giffordlectures.org/Browse.asp?PubID=TPNATR&Volume=0&Issue=0&ArticleID=4 “Natural Religion, vol. 1 1888–1892 Friedrich Max Müller”

My interpretation of a mathematical theory of karma:

Plenty of people get good things that they don’t deserve.

Behind every great fortune is a great crime.
—Honore de Balzac

No one can earn a million dollars honestly.
—William Jennings Bryant

I am wary of attributing “hard work” and “dedication” to people who are successful. In fact, I think the louder someone touts their virtues, the less likely they actually deserved what they got.

While the universe clearly doesn’t operate this way, I feel like people who have been arbitrarily disadvantaged for whatever reason deserve at least some kind of compensatory advantage.

I just have a thing for the underdog, I guess.

The problem I have with overly optimistic philosophies is that it seems to discount the seriousness of human suffering. I mean, seriously, try getting someone who, after 10 grueling years of intensive chemo, followed by an equally grueling course of bone marrow transplant complicated by graft-vs-host disease, just had a relapse of leukemia—try getting them to watch “The Secret” and see how perverse and even insulting that is.

I am suddenly reminded of Pangloss from Candide, and his tripe about “the best of all possible worlds.”

This is not to say that suffering ought to not exist. It’s just part and parcel of the human condition. The inability to feel pain is in itself a disadvantage. Think about diabetic neuropathy or leprosy, where your nerves are all burnt out and you might not even notice that you injured yourself until the wound gets infected and now they’re talking about cutting your limbs off. Think about autistic kids, some of whom literally cannot experience suffering, and ask yourself if you’d want to be in their place.

But to try to find a positive meaning even in the worst, most arbitrary forms of suffering, I think, trivializes the suffering, and I’m not sure that’s an honest way to go. I mean, seriously, are you going to tell the parents of a two year old who has incurable cancer that there’s a positive reason why their two year old is going through this, that there’s a positive reason why their two year old has to die?

My take is that a lot of times (but not always), the universe can be a hostile place, and lots of bad things happen for no good reason whatsoever. I mean, think about it. From what we know of the universe, most of it is completely inimical to life. We’re stuck on this rock orbiting an unremarkable yellow-green star in the middle of nowhere. Anywhere else in the vicinity of a million miles, and you’re sucking on vacuum and exploding, for the most part.

The Western (and often peculiarly American) philosophies that advocate the end of suffering all have this delusion that we deserve to be happy. But the universe owes us nothing. In contrast, while Buddhism, on the surface, also advocates the end of suffering, it does so in a more honest way. Suffering continues to occur, but you train yourself to deal with it, until it is no longer suffering. But enlightenment is an upward battle, a striving against the forces of entropy. You do not get enlightenment for free. And no one can give you enlightenment.

So be careful whom you’re around when you say that everything happens for a reason. This may be true in a basic causality-based framework (every action has a preceding action responsible for it), but to ascribe benign intentionality to the most awful of human suffering is simply sick and wrong.

I have come to realize that the living room of my apartment resembles a terrorist command center. I have three computers and four LCD screens, seven speakers plus a subwoofer, a TV, and a receiver as well as all the requisite cables and hubs and what not in here, because (1) I couldn’t fit it all in my room anyway and (2) the first rule of sleep hygiene is to only use the bedroom for sleeping.

Because the window in the living room opens onto a walkway, and I’m not enough of an exhibitionist to let everyone check me out while they walk by, I always the blinds closed.

Darkness has never really been my friend.

There was an impulse attached to this blog entry, but I find that I have no desire to describe what that impulse is.

Instead, I will blather away about everything and nothing, but mostly nothing.

If this were a real blog post, the content would go here.

Since it’s Mother’s Day, I’m going to meet my parents at the casino. I sometimes worry that my parents have a gambling problem. But whatcha gonna do.

I kind of don’t really want to drive up through the godforsaken mountains of northeast San Diego County, what with being a little sleepy and all, but I’m committed, filial piety and all that.

Lord have mercy on my soul, and my ever-quaking heart. I don’t know where this all came from, but it’s frankly kind of nuts.

I will leave it at that.

Now I realize that happiness in of itself is a rather empty goal, reserved for victims of unusual strokes, the congenitally mentally incapacitated, and the clinically deranged. You lesion a few tracts in your brain, and you can be permanently happy until your dying day, singing “zippy-de-doo-da” out of your asshole, your face guaranteed to freeze with a rictus grin. I can see it now, a corpse grinning maniacally in his/here casket.

And, yes, as the old cliché goes, anything worth having is difficult to attain.

So I don’t understand how I imagined things would necessarily turn out wonderfully, with petals of roses strewn upon my path.

These things take time, patience, and whole lot of masochistic determination.

And maybe the simple problem is that I am a lazy bastard too used to getting things handed to me on a silver platter. The few things that I’ve actually worked excruciatingly for have, in some ways, been accidental, given by the grace of good fortune and inertia. Still, it’s hard to gainsay the non-material worth of a good career and of not being suicidally depressed.

We take the paths with which we are faced with, and we shouldn’t wildly imagine what the destination is going to be like. But, as usual, I wander far afield, with ever increasing prolixity, so I’m just gonna stop now while I’m still ahead.

I suppose if that’s all the medications accomplish, I’m still getting somewhere. For the first time in a long, long time, I actually believe that there’s a good chance that my life will get better. I’m actually looking forward to the future.

The trick here is not to let it degenerate into portentousness and hypomania. As long as I keep this optimistic frame of mind without expecting miracles to happen, I think I’ll do OK.

No more pessimism. No more catastrophizing. If I fail, then I fail, but it shouldn’t mean I’m doomed.

For some reason, while driving, I started thinking about all the major branch points in my life. From a distance, it’s obvious that at each of these junctures, I chose my path. There is probably only one thing that was completely out of my hands, and what can you about love that was not mean to be?

Everything else, I was faced with a decision. My anguish wasn’t really because of being disappointed by the turn of events: for example, when my girlfriend-at-the-time slept with another guy, or the years I didn’t get into med school. My anguish was because I had to choose my path immediately afterwards. It’s been all very existential.

I realize that if I never had a choice, I’d probably be less stressed-out, less anxious. Even if my path had ended up leading me to less than optimal situations. You have to do what you have to do. This is probably the big reason why, most of the time, I don’t feel guilty when one of my patients dies. All the deaths I’ve witnessed were people who were going to die (or, in fact, people who were already essentially dead!) no matter what I did. I’ve felt guilty about little things. Like having to intubate a patient who was never going to get off the ventilator. Or doing chest compressions and cracking the ribs of a patient who was already dead from sepsis. Or really, doing anything invasive and painful, no matter how ultimately futile. I’ve felt bad about those patients who died all of the sudden, except that in retrospect, it really wasn’t all the sudden. The ones that I think of, while they were up and about, walking and talking hours before they died, they had bad, horribly bad diseases. Leukemia in an adult is always bad news. Liver failure is muy malo, perhaps the worst.

Maybe it’s only in the retrospectoscope that it feels like it was going to happen anyway. Call it sophistry. Call it rationalization. I don’t know.

You might ask what sort of choice I had when my girlfriend-at-the-time cheated on me. Obviously, I didn’t have a say in it, but I did have to choose what to do afterwards. I could’ve forgiven her and taken her back. All these years that have passed make it seem impossible to make such a choice, but it was there. Instead, I chose the other path.

Same thing with getting rejected from med school. Each time, I had to choose whether or not I was going to apply again, or whether I was going to just give up and try something else.

That’s where most of the anguish seems to lie, really.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I was disappointed at the time. Devastatingly so. But when the shit hits the fan, it’s too late to think about diapers, really. What is, is. You deal with it and move on. Maybe the trick is, as time passes, you start rationalizing things. It was meant to be. There was nothing I could do about it.

There is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that posits that each decision creates a new universe. Timelines split like amoeba dividing. Maybe that’s what existential anguish is. The labor pains of birthing a new universe.

Can I say for a fact that the choices I’ve made were the best possible of all choices? Of course not. But it’s hard to examine the choices I have made and imagine where I’d be if I didn’t choose what I chose.

In the end, there really isn’t a branch point that I would change the outcome of.

As I’ve said, the trick is not to go overboard. While I like where I am right now, I realize that change is inevitable. Life is all about growth. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. That’s the long and the short of it.

And just because things have gone relatively well thus far doesn’t mean I can’t fuck up big time in the future. But whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? OK, not really, but I guess the point is, why worry if you’re dead? And if you’re not dead, isn’t that a great thing in of itself, regardless of how shitty your situation might be?

I don’t know. I really don’t.

The only thing I know right now is that my heart is at peace, for whatever reason. Maybe it’s just the cocktail of chemicals and neurotransmitters circulating through my cerebrospinal fluid. Maybe I’ve actually figured something out for once.

Maybe the things I thought I saw last week were all in my head. It was fun to imagine, I suppose. But that doesn’t faze me. I’ve been through this quite a few times now, it’s no longer a big thing.

There is something about the coming of summer that makes me want to fall in love. A lot of the times, it becomes a destructive impulse. I easily get obsessed. I easily become dependent. One of these days, perhaps I’ll learn to play the game properly, but today is clearly not that day.

While love is an important thing, certainly one of the three most important things in life, it’s not the only thing. And it’s probably too much to ask for it all.

If I can just hold on to this feeling of hope, if I can get by life’s little disappointments without falling back down into some deep pit of despair, then maybe, maybe it will all be worth it even if I have to journey through the vast uncharted future entirely on my own. There are certainly worse things in life than to be alone.

If I manage to survive another 30 years, I hope that I can look back upon my life and see the major branch points, and still say to myself, those were the right choices.

It’s been a long while since I’ve had to work seven days in a row. In of itself, that kind of schedule makes me cranky. Add to it the fact that this included two overnight calls, and that’s approximately 120 hours of work. Fun times.

I forget who to credit with this little known fact, but I think I’ve figured out why the hours of a resident are so insane. After all, back when modern medicine first started off, amphetamines were legal and easily obtainable, and apparently such illustrious figures in our own mythological pantheon such William Osler, Harvey Cushing, and Stanley Robbins were tweakers.

You’d think working 120 hours every week would be a piece of cake if you were taking speed, too.

Wow. Think about it. I’ve worked three weeks worth of work in seven days. By the end of this rotation, I’ll have worked the equivalent of 3 months!

But I’m not complaining. sarcasm

This whole life-and-death thing is strange. In the space of the last 30 hours or so, I’ve seen a man with metastatic cancer drown in his own blood, another man succumb to multiple infections and septic shock, and another man who has been in a persistent vegatative state for the past week become completely brain dead. Two of these three I dictated the death summary for. The last has become a moral quandry, because of the fact that despite being, for all intents and purposes except organ donation, completely dead, the family refuses to let us disconnect him from his IVs and from the ventilator.

We are effectively desecrating a corpse.

It’s kind of creepy.

If I got to choose what kind of death I’d like to experience, I think I’d prefer one that wasn’t catastrophic and all-of-the-sudden, and yet not too long and drawn out. The guys who come in walking-and-talking and then suddenly exsanguinating really get me down. On the other hand, I’m not a fan of those guys who sit on the wards for months on end slowly dying of cancer, losing organ function literally bit by bit.

Then it dawns on me. Despite the fact that life is pretty damn short, maybe guys my age shouldn’t be so fixated on death. This despite the MSM’s insistence that we bury our faces in it and—I don’t know—pray to God that we might be saved. Iraq. Virginia Tech. Anna Nicole Smith. Are we a culture of Death, or what?

But as to the praying to God thing, sorry, no dice, folks. We all gotta go sometime. Kicking and screaming ain’t gonna win you any prizes in the afterlife. If there even is an afterlife.

Why can’t we all just get along in this lifetime? (And I fully realize that anyone who suggests such a thing tends to get nailed to a piece of wood, or shot, or beaten with police batons.)

By various convolutions, I am led to the old, laughable screed by Kim du Toit entitled ”The pussification of the western male” written way back in 2003. I find what he says so ridiculous that I have a hard time believing that this guy is serious.

But, being in the frame of mind that I have been in, namely, because of my current fascination with mythology of all kinds, I find that TPB’s response is particularly apt.

As expounded by Chuck Pahlaniuk through his avatar Tyler Durden, our first image of God is typically based on our fathers. My father is not a good man. He freely admits this, and sometimes expresses regret about this fact, but he is simply human. Shit happens, life goes on. Nonetheless, he is magnitudes of order better than a lot of the sorry pieces of shit that walk the earth who have happened to have the luck to propagate their DNA via the agency of some unsuspecting woman. (Who me, judgemental?) And while he chafes at it, while he sometimes even openly rebels against it, he seems to have always understood what his duties were, as a man, and as a father, and if you push him hard enough, or are patient with him, he tends to always do the right thing, even if he started off by doing the wrong thing first.

Perhaps unintentionally, my father taught me that rules are made to be broken, and only stupid, simpering fools follow the rules to the T. Conformity is the strait-jacket of the moron, and my father is no idiot. He carries this barely suppressed chip on his shoulder that reeks of exceptionalism, and his speech belies the notion that he thinks that he is better than most people, and I suppose it is well earned. Starting out in a rather poor family, he managed to finagle his way into medical school and through some trickery and farce as well as by some old-fashioned sweat and tears, he entered into a profession that was and still is—in his home country—generally limited to the well-to-do, who have the money to bribe the right people and grease the right palms. Despite his social status, he always felt like he was better and smarter than his classmates who had financial backing, and frankly he treated a lot of them with haughty contempt.

My father also unintentionally taught me contempt for the government and for the powers-that-be. When he entered this country, it was at the tail end of the Vietnam War, when the public was well aware that Americans were being sent there to die for no good reason. Because of financial pressure, and because his medical degree was no good in the U.S., he was basically coerced by his half-brother to enlist in the Navy, and he therefore prepared to get shipped out to get shot without even getting to carry a rifle. Because of his medical training, he ended up being a corpsman (who, because of all the extra gear they had to carry around, only got to have a sidearm) He was eventually attached to the marine base at Camp Pendleton, and by that time, the war had finally truly ended.

But, unlike many of his contemporaries who joined the U.S. armed forces, my dad is no patriot. His anti-establishment leanings are perhaps too fierce, and he claims that when he got discharged from the Navy, he burned his uniform and never looked back.

In any case, my dad is not the macho man that du Toit envisions. What my dad taught me about being a man is that intelligence always wins against force, that you should never employ force when treachery will do the trick, and that doing all the things that men are supposed to do like fighting, carrying guns, drinking, smoking, and fucking are good ways to get you and anyone you care about diseased, maimed, or killed, and frankly, that’s just stupid.

Interestingly, the lessons from my dad maps pretty well with Norse mythology. He basically espouses the ways of Loki, and to a degree, those of Odin. The supposed manly man that du Toit illustrates is more like Thor, whom we all know is basically a muscle-bound dumbass who gets played big time by Loki. And I don’t wanna get played like that. I’d rather be a conniving weasel that no one likes than the big lovable lout that everyone makes fun of behind their back because you can only understand things in black-and-white, good-or-evil, with no intelligence to discern the various shades of gray that permeate the world we live in.

Even more amusing, one of the gods of creation in the Visayan myths is an eagle named Manaul, who through trickery and lies, managed to get the god of the sky and the god of the sea fighting with each other, through which process land was created, all because he wanted to have somewhere to land so that he could rest. Treachery and laziness. I dig it.

Now, mind you, this is not all that I believe in.

My other model for manhood is my uncle, my mom’s brother. Like my dad, he also came from a rather poor family. He is old enough to remember the Japanese occupation during WWII and remembers people getting killed by bayonetting. And being the eldest of the family, he taught me everything that I believe about duty and honor.

See, what I learned from my uncle was that being a man was not about simply amusing yourself and picking fights and being violent for no good reason. Being a man means taking responsibility and taking care people who are weaker than you. Being a man means sacrifice, which is what my uncle embodied. Instead of going to college, he went straight to work, and made money so that my mom and her other siblings could go to school. He was the first to make it to the U.S., and he too joined the U.S. armed forces, although he never fought in any wars. And because he was a person-of-color in the 1950’s, he was restricted to only certain positions, but he never made a big deal about that. Because duty always superseded pride, and if you were doing your duty, it didn’t matter if other people looked down at you.

And I’ve taken the lessons about duty and humility to heart, and this is probably what prevents me from being a son-of-a-bitch like my dad. It is perhaps magnified by an even more dramatic mythological story from my mom’s side of the family, which is about my grand-uncle, who happend to be the eldest in his family as well, and who fought in WWII and who died during the Bataan Death March. My uncle feels that this ultimate sacrifice is part of what gave his family the opportunity to leave the provinces and get an education, because of the significant indemnity that the U.S. government eventually paid for his death. So, taken together, given that I too am the eldest, I found myself living under the shadow of this mythology for a long time.

Now mind you, my dad isn’t as irredeemable as I make him out to be. The man, after all, is a physician, meaning that his duty is to the sick. And, probably because of his own upbringing, he has an affinity to the poor and underserved. Most of his patients are immigrants, and for various reasons, they love him. One of the pharmacists that he knows pretty well once told me that his patients really like the fact that he treats everyone equally, and that he clearly isn’t in this game for the money. So it isn’t like everything I learned from my dad was about being a treacherous bastard.

But neither of these mythologies has much to do with the supposed manhood that du Toit envisions. I mean, what this guy is talking about is about being a kid. Being able to do pretty much what you please, without any of the burden of duty, without any of the inherent limitations of honor. Duty and honor is what holds a civilization together, is what makes this country great. It’s the reason why soldiers were willing to storm the beaches of Normandy which he so blithely cites. Those who died sacrificed themselves for the sake of those who couldn’t protect themselves, and they did it mainly, because it was the Right Thing to Do™. Du Toit, on the other hand, just wants to fight, fuck, and be a dumbshit, and the world be damned. And that’s exactly what W’s administration embodies, and is the exact reason why the rest of the world holds us in dire contempt—even our last remaining ally, the British. This kind of recklessness is the exact reason why we owe China billions upon billions of dollars, and is the exact reason why we are stuck in Iraq with no good way of getting out (although I suppose getting out was never really part of the itinerary—can I say, Subic Bay or Clark?) Because no one wants to talk about duty or honor, we get bullshit like W and Al “Torture” Gonzales dodging and ducking behind patsies like Kyle Sampson and Paul McNulty. We get heinous shit like Abu Ghraib, or those bastards who raped a 14 year old Iraqi girl and then killed her and her entire family.

In a nutshell, what du Toit is advocating is anarchy and the destruction of civilization. Myself, I’m a pessimist, and while I hope for the best, I still expect the worst, and I won’t be surprised if the U.S. collapses like the U.S.S.R. did a little less than a decade ago. All empires must come to an end, and we’ve got all the signs and symptoms of a falling empire. If the shit does hit the fan, and we do get the sort of anarchy that du Toit seems to espouse, I wonder if du Toit will be all that happy about.

So I was eating by myself at a restaurant the other day, and for some reason they were playing all these late ‘70’s/early ‘80’s songs, like “I Say A Little Prayer” by Dionne Warwick, and then “How Deep Is Your Love?” by the Bee Gees. The latter especially took me back to my early childhood. My dad used to own a blue AMC Concord and it had an 8-track tape player and I think he had tapes of Neil Sedaka, Kenny Rogers, and the Bee Gees.

This lead me to the notion of how impermanent magnetic tape is as a storage medium. All it would take to wipe it out is a moderate burst of electromagnetic activity, something that can be readily managed by solar flares, or an EMP weapon. And the more worrisome thing is that we still rely on electromagnetic storage—specifically, your hard drive.

Which led me to thinking about how I should backup my hard drive.

Which led me to thinking how quickly I might be able to get my Linux box with 8 hard drives up and running again.

Today, I had a discussion about how, in this country, we have allowed ourselves to be led by technology, and have failed to address the ethical quandries therein. I am referring specifically to medical technology. What were once thoroughly fatal diseases just one generation ago, are now survivable. It used to be that a heart attack was frequently an instant trip to the morgue, as was a stroke. All we could do was cross our fingers, give you a slug of morphine, and maybe an aspirin, and wish you luck. Now, people, for better or worse, are surviving seven, eight, nine heart attacks, are having multiple bypass grafts and stents, and still they don’t modify their diets or stop smoking, and, as the medical bills mount, with no relief in sight, sometimes with hospitals having to eat the cost, and as hospitals continue to go under, leaving the underserved with basically no health care, we have to ask ourselves, is it worth it to try to salvage those who are basically unsalvageable?

My thoughts then strayed to the NICU, the neonatal intensive care unit, where we manage to artificially sustain what used to be known as an aborted fetus. This is not without terrifying consequences. Many of these babies, weighing little more than a pound, suffer injury from oxygen-starvation, frequently ending up with severe brain injury, and sometimes intractable seizures, sometimes unable to eat without having a tube jammed into their bellies. And we can keep them alive for years, to the point where we transfer them from the pediatric service to the internal medicine service. There are children who continue to live by completely artificial means, where it is questionable whether they lead meaningful lives. And, seriously, I wonder if some of their lives are even as meaningful as my dog’s life, who at least can move around and exercise some volition. Do we really know how much these kids might be suffering?

And I stopped to think why the U.S. alone has failed to address the notion of rationing care and the concept of futility. Sure, there’s the old canard about how we’re a capitalistic society, and if you can pay, you should be able to get whatever you want, but clearly this is no longer the situation. It turns out that almost no one actually pays for their health care. How many of us could actually afford to pay what a CAT scan actually costs? Or even an ER visit? Hell, some of these miracle drugs we have are barely affordable (and many simply can’t.) Somehow we’ve found ourselves in this bizarre tangled weave, where the government has mandated that businesses provide health care insurance, when in fact it’s a misnomer to call it insurance. Getting ill is not a chance proposition, like your house catching fire or getting washed away in a flood. Getting ill is an inevitability and the only way you could possibly avoid it is if you died instantly instead.

And I stopped to think about the Puritanical origins of this country, that twisted form of so-called Christianity known as Calvinism. Hell, maybe it’s even a twisted form of Calvinism. There is this idea that your external appearances and circumstances are the end result of your virtuous or sinful acts. So if you were ugly or crippled, it must be because you deserved it. In this Puritanical world-view, nothing was left to chance, everything had a reason. (I suppose this presaged Deism.) And the reasons were reached by teleology.

So I kind of wonder if that’s not the real reason why the so-called religious are loathe to let people who cannot possibly lead any meaningful existence continue to exist. Because they have this kind of sick, self-righteousness where they imagine that you have to suffer and pay for your imagined sins. When clearly a one-pound baby couldn’t have possibly had any chance to commit a sin. When we know for a fact that many illnesses are caused by microscopic organisms and something that God has created as punishment.

Hell, this attitude of many Americans has been revealed by their reaction to AIDS, blaming it on homosexuality and sexual promiscuity, and by their reaction to other STDs, and their refusal to allow the use of protection for sexual intercourse.

Then, since it’s almost Christmas, I suppose it’s natural that my thoughts should stray to thinking about Jesus Christ. And for some reason, I started meditating on the commandments he was supposed to have given. Namely, (1) Love God (2) Love your neighbor. And I stopped to think about it. I think he actually left another one: Do not be afraid.

So I feel like the average American “Christian” is a big hypocrite, wishing ill-will on their fellow human beings, and mostly, by being afraid. The fact that they let terrorists affect them is a sign of their lack of faith in God. Didn’t he say “do not be afraid, I am with you”?

(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.

I think the book in The Chronicles of Narnia that left the strongest impression on me was The Magician’s Nephew[site by Keith Webb][on wikipedia]. The setting that I remember most strongly is the ruined and blasted world of Charn, destroyed by the White Witch Jadis by using magic that seems strongly allegorical to nuclear weaponry. I was struck by how the monarchy of Charn started off being benevolent and wise, then became corrupted and evil, eventually spawning the monstrosity that is the White Witch. I also remember the hue of redness encompassing Charn. (Was C.S. Lewis trying to evoke medieval visions of Hell?) What was interesting to me was the explanation for this reddish light—Charn’s sun is a red giant star. While this could’ve just been an idiosyncrasy of this particular world, it actually evoked in me the idea that the civilization of Charn had existed so long that their formerly sun-like star had exhausted its nuclear fuel and was beginning to cool and expand. For some reason (although this is apparently not the reason for its destruction), this also reminds me of the destruction of the planet of Krypton, but that is neither here nor there.

In a work that is so theologically-based, specifically, Christianity-based, it is hard not to think about theological issues, and the idea that popped into my head is the question as to whether corruption is an inevitability without saving grace.

Now the laws of thermodynamics tells us that disorder ever increases, so it would seem that in fact, this is the natural way of things. And yet, human life, and life in general, seems to belie this basic law, and points to the fact that thermodynamics is, at its base, a statistical argument, and cannot easily predict local effects or the ultimate fate of an open system. It cannot be denied that some branches of evolution have led to more and more complex ordered organisms. While we we cannot ever prove that we evolved from primordial slime forming the first prokaryotic cell, we know for a fact that we all start out as a single eukaryotic cell in the womb (or in an egg in some organisms.) We also have a lot of evidence that mitochondria are descended from prokaryotes. In the long run, yes, it is still an increase of disorder because our complexity comes at the price of the creation of our waste products which are incredibly disordered.

My point, however, is that it would seem that it is inevitable that people can start off good and noble, and over the years and the generations, they will definitely be evil and base. Lewis’ commentary on the monarchs of Charn outline this idea and apply it to government, and I can’t help but immediately apply this to the decay of the American Republic.

The interesting thing is the idea of error-correction. This is part and parcel of our modern information culture and economy. The brilliance of the Internet is based significantly on the idea of error-correction. Error-correction mostly prevents the inevitable corruption of ordered information (although we all know nothing is perfect) and better than 99 times out of 100, things turn out O.K. Life itself is pretty good at error-correction—the replication of DNA is wonderfully faithful, although clearly there are errors that are made. (And yet errors are the basis of evolution and increasing complexity and order.)

I think one of the unique things about the American Republic is its basis in a potentially self-correcting document—the Constitution. But, more immediately, the checks and balances established by the Constitution are also error-correcting.

The reason why the Republic is in such crisis is that the Bush administration and their adherents are greatly intent on (1) dismantling these checks and balances and (2) destroying the Constitution. Once these error-correcting mechanisms are disabled, we put ourselves on the fast-track of inevitable corruption, evil, and atrocities and crimes against humanity (and while Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are bad enough, you can be assured that things are bound to get much, much worse. With error-correction disabled in DNA replication, what you inevitably get is cancer. And I tend to think about Empire this way. Empire is analogous to cancer—eventually fatal to its host in the end.

So, if you wanted to be unnecessarily mystical, you can think of error-correction (and selection pressure) as the Hand of God. God® and His Saving Grace™ are the only way to prevent the inevitable corruption and decay of the universe, and the only way to actually increase local complexity and order.

(And by stretching some metaphors, Bush and his cronies are necessarily agents of Satan, who are interested in disabling error-correction.)