Dyer foresees the Future (Future: Tense, 2004)

 Gwynne Dyer.  Future: Tense (2004)

I’ve watched a video of Dyer making the same points as he makes here: Terrorists cause very little damage compared to other risks, but because they choose their targets carefully, they get an enormous amount of publicity. They also get a disproportionate response. These two effects make terrorists seem more dangerous than they are, help spread their ideologies. and lend legitimacy to their claims of political importance. The ripple effects are increased risks of wars between nations.

The context of Dyer’s remarks is the Middle East, the economic and political decline of the Muslim world, and the rise of the West. (An irony he doesn’t emphasise is that the Islamic terrorist groups are incapable of making the weapons systems they use, which they buy from Western sources).

Dyer makes a few predictions, which have failed only in details such as timing and who did what to whom. The general forecast, that the Middle East is the most likely place for triggering a world-wide war, seems at present only to prescient. He also called for a stronger consensus that such a war must be avoided. We can only hope that such a consensus will stop and reverse the current escalation of the quarrel between Israel and Iran.

Dyer says that the Israel helped Hamas establish itself, calculating that political rivalry with the PLO would prevent the Palestinians from achieving their goal of nationhood. The Wiki article on Hamas does state that “Numerous Islamist leaders, including senior Hamas founder Mahmoud Zahar, met with Yitzhak Rabin as part of "regular consultations" between Israeli officials and Palestinians not linked to the PLO.[27]”, which supports Dyer’s claim.

The “new world order” foreseen by Dyer is a shifting in the economic and military balance between the US, Russia and China, expressed in part by proxy wars and skirmishes. Most of those will be in the Muslim world. Terrorism will continue to be a useful bogeyman for any politician who needs some street-cred. In other words, business as usual. Dyer did not foresee Putin’s rise and his goal to Make Russia Great Again.

Dyer is a dispassionate observer of power politics. Power hunger is a widespread human trait. There’s an equally wide-spread hunger for rule by a powerful leader, arising from the mistaken belief that only a strong leader can protect the tribe and keep order. That is one of the main drivers of war.

A book worth reading. ***

Millennium (Varley, 1983)

John Varley. Millennium. (1983) One of the best time-travel stories I’ve read. The frame is simple enough: In the far future, humans have adapted to the Earth they polluted, but those adaptations enable survival barely long enough to reproduce. Homo sapiens is dying out.

A Gate provides access to the past. It’s used to gather as many genetically strong humans as possible in order to send them off to a distant planet to start over and recreate human civilisation. The team grabs people who are about to die, thus preventing any disturbance of the time stream.

During a snatch of people from a plane about to crash, a stunner is left behind. It’s up to team leader Louise Baltimore to recover it. But Bill Smith, a smart investigator of plane crashes, notices something’s not quite right. Complications ensue.

Varley is an excellent narrator of the work of investigating plane crashes, and has invented plausible logistics of time travel and the reasons for the Project. His characterisation is good enough that we care for the people. Smith and Baltimore, the two main narrators, are both damaged by life and  circumstances, which makes their decisions and hence the results more believable.

Recommended. ***

A collage (2015)

 

Time (Lapham's Quarterly 7:04)

 Lapham’s Quarterly 7:04: Time (2014) How do you think about time? Is it a river that carries us along? Is it some abstract something that passes? Is it something that one spends, and once spent, is gone forever?

These metaphors and more are the ways we conceive of Time. Physicists point out that time is a conundrum. On the one hand all closed systems tend towards disorder. Open systems can scavenge energy that drives transformations that maintain or increase order. When that external energy input stops, the system decays into increasing disorder. Thus the forward direction of the Arrow of Time, which we experience as the flow or passing of time.

Expressions and musings about that experience form the bulk of this collection. Any reader will recognise their own experience and thoughts represented here. But there’s almost nothing about time as an aspect of reality.

Albert Einstein’s theories play a cameo role. More recent (and current) problems with time as a physical fact, or an aspect of reality, don’t show up at all. So let me offer a few musings of my own.

For us humans, the central fact of time is that for each of us it will end. For some that end

comes before the body disintegrates, when dementia destroys memories, and in doing so destroys the self. Knowing that this could happen to me creates a dread that I hurriedly push down below the tissue-thin surface of mind that I experience as my self. Time is the essence of what the brain constructs as my experience of reality. Consciousness exists only while it’s happening. That means my self, me, I exist only while I’m happening. Maybe that’s why the Christian creed asserts a belief in the resurrection of the body.

When I was growing up, the usual measure of distance was time. The next village was a half-hour away. Gruber’s farmstead was 3/4 hour away. The post office was 5 minutes away. And so on. So Einstein’s space-time to me seemed fairly obvious when I first read about it. Of course, I didn’t know the math that combines these aspects of reality. But I knew that moving through space always took time. Einstein’s space-time clarifies this: To move through space requires movement through time.

So what happens when we are standing still? Why do we still move through time? Well, we stand still within our frame of reference. But that frame of reference is moving with respect to every other frame of reference you care to specify. Which means we are not standing still. Which also means that time transcends frames of reference. Or that a frame of reference is specifiable only as moving through time. Which makes time, not space, the fundamental “whatever-it-is” of reality.

Maybe.

To exist means moving through time. When an entity ceases to exist, it disappears. But nothing disappears. So to cease to exist means to change into something else. 

Consciousness exists only while it’s happening. Anesthesia interrupts consciousness. Sleep is a different form of consciousness. When you “wake up from” from anesthesia, there is no sense that time has passed. Well, that’s my experience. But when I wake up from sleep, I know that time has passed, because I have memories of dreaming. I don’t know about comas, but descriptions of the experience suggest that comas are interruptions of consciousness like anesthesia.

Since consciousness exists only while it’s happening, time is of the essence of consciousness.

“Exist” implies time. Hence the question “Does God exist?” is a non-question, since by definition God is not in time but beyond it. (That phrasing shows that we can draw logical conclusions from statements that refer to things we cannot imagine.)

Time is a puzzle.

As always, this collection is an excellent overview and sampling of what humans have thought and imagined and reported about its topic. Recommended. ****

Delusions of Perfection (Lapham's Quarterly 7-02: Revolutions)

 Lapham’s Quarterly 7-02: Revolution (2014) Like the collection on States of War, this one is tough reading. People have committed more atrocities in the pursuit of an imagined perfection than for any other purpose. Religious persecution is one example. Revolution is the other. We should perhaps be thankful there is no third.

     There are many noble phrases recorded here, but they all express the same delusionary superstition that some final, permanent solution the the problems of humankind will usher in a perfect way of life. Reading them was bad for my equanimity and blood pressure.

A necessary read. Recommended. ****

Oh, To Be Young Again! (Youth, Lapham's Quarterly 7-03)

Lapham’s Quarterly 7-03: Youth (2014). “Youth’s a stuff will not endure” sang Feste the Fool in Twelfth Night. But the response to that insight is mixed. Some mourn what they recall as a time of promise and energy and sweet, sweet love of the world and the people in it. Others are glad it’s over, and they can, at last, embark on a life planned and controlled by themselves. The evidence gathered here suggests that the latter attitude is the more common one.

Me, what I recall from my childhood and youth surprises me in two ways. One, I can’t actually imagine the Me that was six or twelve years old. The photos of me, the letters that my mother kept, the oddments that I know were once precious to me, none of them translate into Oh, now I know what it was like. And two, when I think of the dumb-ass things I did as a teenager, I’m surprised I’m still here to remember them. A fraction of a second one way or the other would have meant my death.

Nevertheless, reading other people’s thoughts and reminiscences does trigger a hint of a feeling of what childhood and youth was like. The imagination supplies what memory cannot.

Recommended ****

Medicine (Lapham's Quarterly 2-04, 2009)

 Lapham's’s Quarterly 2-04: Medicine (2009) Some random thoughts in response to this collection:

Archeologists and paleontologists have found evidence of care for the sick dating back millennia before the earliest medical texts. That care, and the signs of intentional burial, were both at one time believed to be species-specific behaviour. Observation of chimpanzees and elephants have blurred that picture, but there’s no doubt that humans have taken medicine very seriously. Every known society gives medical practitioners a special role and responsibility. The roles of physician and the priest are often combined. Cures are often understood as miracles: It’s not surprising that many of Jesus’s miracles were cures.

Through most of our history, what made us sick and what kept us well was summed up in precepts based on random observation. The history of medicine as a science is a nice example of how we humans strive to make sense of inadequate and often unreliable data. The first attempts to create a theoretical framework, the four humours, that might guide the practitioner to diagnose and treat unknown conditions we now know got it wrong. But based on the available data, it was reasonable. After all, whatever insight is claimed in one domain must match or at least not clash with whatever insights are claimed in another. The four humours of Greco-Roman medicine made sense, given what engineers and carpenters and farmers knew about how the material world worked, and what philosophers said about the four elements tied it all together..

Through most of history, medical practice dealt mostly with ameliorating symptoms. Sickness would strike without warning, and pandemics were common. I think it’s difficult for us to imagine the terror that sudden illness would provoke. The reactions to covid-19 show that nowadays we suffer not from the superstitious fear of plagues, but from the superstitious confidence that they won’t kill us.

Quacks have been with us from the beginning. Nowadays, many of them wear the mantel of wellness. I think quackery succeeds because science doesn’t provide the certainty people want from theories of Life, the Universe and Everything (TLUEs). The life sciences are especially prone to revise theories and replace them with more complicated ones. Quacks promise simplicity and certainty wrapped in pseudo-scientific jargon designed to create the illusion that here, at last, we have the Truth. “Natural” figures prominently in their claims. I guess most people just don’t know that the most lethal substances known are all natural. Mother Nature wins again. She always does.

Another wonderfully diverse collection. ****