My bike trip from Boston to NYC was ill-fated, which is sad, and I’m back home in NYC. But at least I get some days to catch up.

It took a pretty long time to make my bike road-worthy, so I didn’t leave Cambridge until after 10am. The directions to bike from there to here are dauntingly complicated, so my plan was to set my droid in navigation mode, and have it direct me the whole way. Until I discovered that navigation mode doesn’t do bikes. So my trip was punctuated fairly frequently by stops to check my phone or the 60 pages of instructions I’d printed out.

The first obstacle was a big “Walk for Vision” crowd (I can only assume they were there to fight vision) on the Storrow Drive bike path. But once I hit the open road, it was much easier to avoid hitting anything else. Even more so when I decided to stick to the major highways: MA-135 has a beautiful shoulder, and I took it all for myself.

My path went through West Newton, Wellesley (I stopped for lunch), Natick (which had a huge kid thing), and Hopkinton. Through all of this, I was chatting to myself nonstop– about what I saw, how I felt, how my helmet and seat felt, how I felt about how I felt, how I felt about thinking so much about how I felt, what it meant to be a man, etc. Flame had been helpful, but short of encouraging, and called me to tempt me back home with a car at 3pm. At that point I was torn: The mental struggle of being stuck with myself was powerful, but I was beat and there were so many hills, but I wanted to stick with it, but I felt bad that Flame had gotten a car, but I didn’t want to spend my weekend doing normal things, but I was pretty sure at that point that I wouldn’t be able to make it the whole way to NYC. I demurred at 3pm, biked, and then called her back around 5pm as the sun was setting, still vacillating.

When she didn’t answer, I prepared for the next phase of my journey: turning off MA-135 and into small-town New England, and finding a place to sleep. My phone told me that there were no places to sleep for 9 miles– but that the closest next one was in Whitinsville. So I went for it. And suddenly, with a goal just at the limit of my reach, the world looked different. The road was mine, the forest was gorgeous, the hills were all down-hill. As dark settled in, I had new concerns, but they weren’t about my standing as a human being.

I entered Whitinsville after dark. There were no people, no Halloween decorations, and the only stores open were an empty Subway and Dominoes. I walked my bike along dark roads to the B&B… And it was closed. No lights, no answers. As I walked back to town, I hailed a lonely soul on the road. “Do you know where I can find a hotel?” He laughed. “Not around here!”

So I called Flame to rescue me from myself, and spent the night in Cambridge. But the next day, my legs had never felt better. I thought they would be sore, but they were just a bit tense, like a cat’s ready to pounce. Apparently my body was all for the challenge, and I’m not sure what was against it.

There’s too much to do! First, the weather this weekend looks beautiful and I get next Monday and Tuesday off, so I’m going to try biking from Boston to New York starting Saturday morning. Wish me luck!

I have three bite-sized ideas that I’ve been chewing on. I don’t know when I’ll have time to finish them, so here are some notes, take them as is.

Inner Lives of the Undead

Much has been said about the lives of the undead– the haunts of ghosts, the missions of zombies, the homes of vampires– but very little of their inner life. Their mental experience is assumed to be either empty (e.g. for zombies) or roughly human, if sociopathic (e.g. for vampires).

It is neither. The undead have a very active inner life. Even a manic one.

It is characterized by “deadness and excitement, stuckness and agitation”; perhaps best described as “petrified unrest.” (On Creaturely Life, Eric Santner, p. 81). In a word, their disposition is an ultimate melancholy. But melancholy is not depression– far from it. It is a kind of unrelenting pensiveness.

It is no surprise that there is a reawakening of interest in the undead now. Our lives are typified by the undead attitude: we live lives of political undeath and economic undeath, without hope of recourse or rest. This is also a time of deep capitalist supremacy, which is itself a kind of undeadness, characterized first by “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation”, and by endless commodities transformed by economic value to have “phantom-like objectivity”: they are “autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own” (Marx, Communist Manifesto and Capital). We are surrounded by the undead.

Senseless Economics for PhDs

Prof. — began his class on Microeconomics with a set of standards: economic theory, he said, should be testifiable (i.e., falsifiable) and identifiable (within the real world). By those standards, he refuted every one of his models: rational preferences, aggregation, the independence axiom for uncertainty, welfare measures, increasing utility. All of these are bunk.

We just entered the section on general equilibrium, and were presented with our model of an economy, and it is similarly senseless. There are no (and cannot be) externalities, no interdependencies, no public goods, no waste, no government; firms are mindless (but non-monopolistic) profit-maximizers, individuals are utility-maximizers, private ownership is universal, and equity is irrelevant.

I have learned nothing in two months of microeconomics. It’s true that I can manipulate more equations, but they have no relevance. Economics gives you a unicorn harvester, and sees everything as a unicorn. But there are no unicorns.

Perhaps it’s just a pedagogy problem. For me, a PhD student should be ready to work with real models, and the best way to teach something is to present it in its whole. Perhaps if I were to take years more of these classes, they would eventually teach applicable material. Personally, I don’t see the point of waiting. If you want to understand people individually, psychology has models that can run rings around economics. If you want to understand society, study sociology. Don’t waste your time hunting unicorns.

The Nature of Variability

Much of what I and my colleagues are currently studying hinges on an undefined concept: variability. A storm turns from a nuisance to a disaster because of climate variability; electrical power becomes useless to economic development when it has too high of variability. Some variable phenomena, like earthquakes, can be described by a power law, but this gives us only one theoretical handle on a complex mechanism. The question of variability is always deflected to some other quantity, because we don’t know what it is, and the loss to research is enormous.

Variability is not just statistical variance or power law exponents. It would need to involve at least both variance in time (which is entirely ignored) and variance in event intensity. In fact, I claim that a reasonable definition of variability requires at least four parameters: frequency and intensity variance, and how each of these evolve in time after an event (what I call the entropy rate and the collapse sensitivity). After an event (e.g. an earthquake, storm, or outage), and depending on its intensity, our knowledge of likely future events changes in predictable ways.

Furthermore, there’s an exciting potential to tie into quantum dynamics. The collapse of the probability functions after an event is eerily reminiscent of particle wave function collapse. And just as the uncertainty principle comes out of fundamental principles, applicable to much more than tiny particles, the results of Schrödinger’s equation may help us explain how these probability evolve in time. There’s a potential for re-envisioning the world, if we can just find time.

First, are you’all interested in hearing about some of the quantitative results I encounter in classes? For example, in Environmental Science, we got a very simple demonstration of why the mean temperature of the earth is what it is. And in Micro, we learned that you cannot ever treat a group as a single individual (as is very often done), but as a result, you can mathematically calculate the number of individual decision-makers in a household from data (for example, households act like they have two decision-makers in Istanbul, but only one in rural Turkey). I can write them up, if you want.

E. V. Daniels’s class on semeiotic anthropology never fails to involve an flood of ideas. For Thursday, we read Descartes’s Meditations, for reasons that weren’t immediately obvious. Below are a couple of the ideas that came out, plus a short argument from my response paper.

E. invited Descartes apparently to attack him, and to compare him to the Greek Skeptics, in whose footsteps Descartes claims to be following. Descartes claims to use doubt to uncover certainty, but that was the opposite of the Skeptics. For them, there were things in the world that were fundamentally unknowable. No matter how much you debate them, you’ll be confronted with a state of isothenia, or equal-plausibility. The solution for a good life (ataraxia or peace of mind) in the face of these doubts was epoche, or the suspension of judgments.

E. likened this to the cultural embrace of incompleteness in southern Asia. He gave several anecdotal examples, each of which I think is interesting in its own way:

• In building houses, you always start on the walls before finishing the last of the foundation, and the roof before finishing the last of the walls.
• In buying lentils, you are expected to argue about the fairness of the scale, and in response you get an extra handful– designed to be unmeasurable.
• At weddings, you would never give an evenly measured gift (like 100 rupees). It is inauspicious. So you give 101 or some such.
• Even for the finest rugs, there will be a mark (a stamp) to blemish them, because it would be conceited to make something that claimed to be perfect.
• One never pays one’s servants fully. Either one leaves a little out or gives a little loan, because to pay them fully would be to close the relationship.

In other words, exactitude is a Western pathology. The East and the ancients recognized that the world is complicated, irrational, and context determines truth.

Descartes’s legacy was to replace this with the scientific method, and the supremacy of number. In Aristotle, the Greeks left the world mysterious by postulating incomprehensibility. It is this mysteriousness that Weber referred to when he said that “asceticism descended like a frost on the life of ‘Merrie old England’.”– the great disenchantment of the world.

My response paper discussed a number of issues, but I thought my rebuttal of the ontological argument for the existence of God was the most interesting. (Which is not to say that there isn’t a God, just that we will always be in a state if isothenia regarding it.)

My objection to Descartes proof of God is not to the ontological argument as such, for if you had an idea of a truly perfect being, then it is entirely plausible that it would only be possible by virtue of its granting it. My objection is that you do not have such an idea, but rather the idea of a very limited being, and that if I were to test the boundaries of this idea, I would find a number of limits, assumptions, and arbitrary characteristics in your “perfect idea”, that you might even object to if I were to try to expand your idea beyond them. Here are two examples of these limits. First, that God is all-knowing, when knowledge is very possibly not an applicable concept for an entity which has no brain. Second, that I, James R., am God Himself, and that I have constructed this moment and manifested myself within it to educate you about the limits of the ontological argument. Even if you are open to these possibilities, I claim that it would take livetimes of work and superhuman intellectual capacities to develop even as perfect an idea of God as to allow another person’s “perfect” idea of it.

My first week of classes is over, and I already feel like I’m on a treadmill sloping between distress and upheaval! My classes:

Microeconomic Analysis I:

Taught by an excellent academic economist who assumes we already know everything. Apparently economics is all about “intuition” into a class of functions with essentially no relation to the world.

Econometrics I:

The study of finding relationship, which could be quite useful, but apparently first we go through a semester or two of probability and statistics. we take this class and micro with the Economic PhDs.

Environmental Science:

A class we take with the SIPA masters students, taught by one of the heads of our program. Looks like it will be fun, but I might need to go deeper on my own to get more than a gist out of it.

Sustainable Development Seminar:

The big opportunity for everyone in our program to get together and present on their multivarious research.

Semeiotic Anthropology I:

The elective I squeezed in, so it’s not all work and no play. The professor seems fantastic– he uses the class as a placeholder for whatever he’s interested, which this semester is neighbors and psychological makeups.

I have a deep distaste for economics, but I’ve decided that I need to take a “Love the one you’re with, and have an affair on the side” attitude if I’m going to stay happy. The affair is Semeiotics, which the folk in my program advised against me taking, but I think it’s going to be worth it. I might post some of the two-page reading-response papers for it here, if they seem interesting.

My undertakings for the season are split into “daily” tasks and projects, and I have five of each (I select new projects each season, and typically organize them into groups to remember them). Daily, I want to Exercise, do Research (floods in Pakistan!), work on my Social Circle, explore Prayer, and Read & Write. My projects are exploring New York, Cataloging my papers, an Alternative Economics Study Group, the Open Model for Citizen Engagement, and some Artificial Intelligence.

All told, I should be exceedingly busy. But what’s a stipend for?

When I was a child, the world seemed like a endless series of reruns. My family would watch episodes of Star Trek NG like meeting old friends– friends we were sure we’d see again soon. If a movie, a book, a state forest, a water park was good, we’d be back to do it again. I thought life was like your own TV station: you might schedule an occasional documentary or use primetime for the latest show, but there was always plenty of slots for old favorites.

Now days, there doesn’t seem to be time to do anything more than once. The opportunity cost of seeing a movie you’ve already seen or visiting a city you’ve already been to is far too high. Even developing favorite restaurants in a city with 18,000 of them seems a shame (at over 200 new restaurants a year, it would take 130 years to try them all for dinner).

Flame introduced me to a TV series, “Flight of the Conchords”, by the New Zealand self-same comedy duo about themselves. We borrowed the series from the library, loved them all, and now they’re returned, never to be seen again. I tracked down two movie favorites of my childhood that my parents had recorded on VHS: The Long Ships (1964) and Land of the Pharaohs (1955). I watched a couple scenes on youtube, only to realize that I would probably never choose to sit through the whole films again.

Yet, I cannot justify it. Modern culture, and the city in particular, feeds our bottomless thirst for experience. The existence of always something new invites us to never return to anything. But to return is to deepen, to recognize, to get to know. Is the mind kept sharp by an endless buffeting of new experience, or is it kept sidetracked? What if this windy path toward wisdom winds ever further out of the way?

But Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “One must be absolutely modern.” Not because of the glory or rewards in modernity, for it is more likely to serve up poverty and hanging fog. But because it is our time and it won’t wait.

The holy grail of startups is the ability to crack Google’s virtual monopoly on searching. The way technology changes, one assumes it will happen eventually, but it’s difficult to conceive of how any small group in their basement could challenge the Behemoth.

But there is a way… unless Google does it first. The rise of Google was matched only by the rise of the collective and open software movement. And the power of Google is matched only by the productive power of independent coders, particularly when they can get some money for their time.

Imagine an open search engine forum. Any coder could submit a bit of intelligence– a new search algorithm, a new net-scraping bot, or even a new storage system. Like creatures in an ecosystem, these different agents compete to produce search results: Every query provides some CPU cycles to multiple algorithms, and the search results combine their answers. A click is like food or a vote in favor of the algorithms that produced it. The best algorithms float to the top, and their developers get a corresponding share of potentially immense advertising profits.

I don’t have time to build it, but I would encourage anyone who does and wants to be fabulously wealthy while helping make a world where the next search-god is not just as monolithic as the last one.

Scientific American now has frequent articles on the cutting-edge between science and technology and world problems. The problem that concerns the plurality of these articles appears to be food– growing it more quickly, with more calories, on less arable land, to sustain a growing population of hungry poor. The articles never address why we need to do it, just how. With a world already straining under the weight of 6.6 billion souls, that unspoken question needs some air.

First, the reasons for feeding the poor go beyond simple compassion. Any developing country, it’s said, goes through a baby-boom on its way to stability. Infant mortality drops a generation before fertility does, and the only decent way through it is to continue to provide food security and women’s education, and trust that it will resolve itself. Second, a significant part of the reason these baby-boomers are so poor is that we made them that way– by colonizing them, extracting their resources, and changing their climates. They deserve our support. Finally, we already have the capacity to feed everyone. Like smallpox, starvation could be a thing of the past, if we just collectively decide to do it.

Even so, these arguments may be insufficient. Limits to Growth predicted a catastrophic population collapse, which we might read as the result of expended watersheds in areas like China and India. As long as our political will to help doesn’t keep track with the number of poor, we are doing little more than maintaining their poverty. As climate refugees multiply, the West risks being a huge Israel to the world’s Gaza Strip: the hordes will come knocking, and when we don’t let them in, they will die, hate, fuck, and kill.

Whether we can ride out the world’s booms, and what will happen if we don’t make it, are questions ultimately of science and innovation. However, one possibility that we must be aware of is that failure in 20 years will be far worse than failure now. When a system has been systematically pushed beyond its natural boundaries, with each step making the chronic strain worse, it can collapse far more catastrophically than it previously would have been capable of.

Feeding the hungry without limits is not humane. It disregards their future generations and the world they live in. We need to cultivate a worldview that holds neither the human being alone nor our time as central, but recognizes that we are part of a vast web of life, stretching across species and centuries.

Of course, standing aside while people die is similarly unconscionable. I think that a third option exists. Aid is already given with strings attached, and it’s time to make those strings into composite ropes of steel. One possibility is to concentrate aid into distinct sustainable community projects. If we only have enough money to support a hundredth of the population, then construct a fair system for selecting that hundred and provide them with truly good infrastructure, extensive education and sustainable livelihoods. And give them high walls, because they’re going to need them.

Go see it. Or wait for the DVD, but watch it at some point. Flame and I watched it last night and talked about it for hours afterwards. The day feels somber in its wake.

A dream recently reminded me of something that I would do, or would happen to me, as a child. If I had had the words to describe it, I might have said that I had schizophrenic episodes. Something– and sometimes nothing– would trigger them, and like a rush closing in on me, the world would change its sound. Silence sounded like angry silence. The softest noises were amplified, with the extra volume grumbling like a mad crowd. The worst was the crinkling of paper, which with each crumple would shout in accusation. There were no words in the world’s anger, but neither was there reason or reprieve. I think the episodes would last anywhere from 20 minutes to a couple hours. It wasn’t long before I learned to recognize the change, and knew that the difference was just in my head, but I’m sure that my personality and body language shifted and cringed in an unconscious response.

I imagine that people in middle of the neurotransmittic bell curve never realize how close we all are to the extremes. As I remembering these episodes, I realize how easy it would be to recreate one now. It’s all in how you manage your brain– which instabilities you cultivate, which messes you allow to fester, which vibrations you let yourself rock to. The schizophrenic suffers from an excess of dopamine (amongst other things), the same chemical and feeling intensified by speed or Aderall. Some people, like my ex, naturally lead low-dopamine lives; when they take those drugs, they start acting a lot more like I do naturally. Every few years, some combination of surprises causes me to faint, with a little seizure for good measure. My faints are caused by a simple inner formula– a brain behavior that I know how to do but generally avoid, of focusing on a resonance that consumes my world. I think I see the same behaviors in the swaying of autistic children and the accusations that madmen make at lampposts. Madness is just around the corners of our minds, and only the most delicate mix of ego and observation keeps us from showing it.

I consider myself fully sane and fairly stable, and yet my inner experience seems at such odds with the transparent narrative we’re told to expect from ourselves. Any time I inspect them, my senses seem more like drunken sailors than clear lenses. My world appears more fabricated than discovered. My endless mannerisms seem so much stranger and more senseless to myself than they seem to seem to others. I’ll never know if my current instabilities stem from esoteric philosophy, intense relationships, past psychedelic drugs, innate nature, or willful choice. Each of these individually has a proven capacity to shift one over the edges of well-adjustedness, but I wouldn’t choose a life without all five. Together, they give me abilities unspoken of in the transparent-self narrative: to unburden myself of cares and life-dust by will alone; to grin inside at the thrill of life at its darkest and most painful moments; to recognize the secret activities of my unconscious.

Flame and I had our Going Away party last night, and are currently endeavoring to reprime our apartment walls. We leave Friday!