A reasonable facsimile thereof
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2004 has come and gone. 2005 has arrived out here in the Ratlands. I have nothing special for you to mark the occasion. No resolutions. No cheerful greetings or wishes for a prosperous new year. It is what it is. It will probably be more of the same.

Actually, I think about New Years much the same as I do about Christmas. Why do we have to wait til this time of year to be cheerful and charitable towards our fellow man? Why do we have to wait til this day to resolve to be better people? Why now? There is nothing inherently unique, significant or special about this particular point in the Earth's continuing journey around the Sun. This is an arbitrarily imposed chronological marker. As such, there is no more reason to resolve to be a better person today than there was yesterday or there will be tomorrow or the next day or the next or the next.

Conversely, there is no reason why I shouldn't wake up every day of my life and, after thanking whatever Cosmic power I believe operates in the universe for another opportunity, strive to become a better person, rather than wait for an arbitrary day once a year to make promises to myself.

(Gosh, Sparky, that almost sounded positive and inspirational. You'd better go drink heavily so you can watch TV tomorrow with the blinds closed and the curtains drawn while nursing your "amateur night" hangover...)

All nonsense aside, the Head Rat and I would like to formally and publicly (sort of) congratulate our "not-friends" J and T on their wedding yesterday. We wish you and the crew all the best (The New Year's Eve wedding was a tax thing, right?) and hope to see you at the lake this summer.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Saturday, January 01 2005 12:12:17 AM

Welcome Back, my Friends to the Show that Never Ends
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I've always thought this should be adopted as the theme song for the agency I work for. It seems appropriate, on-target and hints at the circus-like nature of the correctional process (on bad days, anyway). That, and I always liked Emerson, Lake and Palmer. I happened to hear this particular tune on the radio as I was driving home from work tonight.

On another note, I've read through the past few entries I made. They didn't end up being quite as coherent as I had hoped. But, they got cobbled together on scraps of paper in between other things I was doing and I see no real reason to re-write them.

I had intended to write about reaction to the Indian Ocean tsunami tonight, but I just don't seem to be able to put my thoughts together in a coherent way. Maybe tomorrow. Or, the next day. But then again, that is sort of the point. I see lots of hand wringing and commiserating and (no-doubt heart-felt) pleas to help and I don't have a problem with any of that. The sentiment is good and generous and I am in no way denigrating the outpouring of feeling and financial aid. And while I get a bit testy about those who suggest that in some way all those deaths are somehow our fault because we are rich and they are poor, I am not trying to suggest that we shouldn't help. I think my point is that it is easy to point the finger at the West, in general, and the US, in particular and say that it is our fault. If you look around you can find someone who thinks everything in the world is our fault. But before we get too smug and self-satisfied in our hair shirts, think for a minute exactly what it is that we (the US in particular) could have done to prevent all these deaths.

Should we have spent the money necessary to install western-style modern infra-structure in all populated coastlines of the affected areas whether the people there wanted it or not? Imagine the howls of outrage that would rise if we imperialistic capitalists tried to export the trappings of our material lifestyle in such a manner. Imagine the howls of outrage that would rise because we were subverting the stability of the governments of the region by undermining them and making them look impotent and dependent on the US. Imagine the howls of outrage that would rise because we were destroying the lifestyles of indigenous peoples. Imagine the howls of outrage that we were raping the environment.

Or perhaps we should have donated trillions of dollars to the governments of the region on the condition that the money be spent on tsunami warning infrastructure? Do you think that would have produced meaningful results in, say Suharto's Indonesia, for example? Do you think there would have been eager acceptance of such a thing, or do you think the governments involved would have been insulted by such a patronizing, paternalistic gesture?

Or maybe we should have donated the money to that paragon of virtue and good management, the United Nations? Do you think they could have prevented a substantial number of these deaths?

Tell me what we could have done? Or, tell me what we could have done that would make these deaths not our fault, except not be rich and powerful.

So, spare me the guilt trip. It is a sad fact that no matter what resources are available, preventing deaths in these kinds of "Acts of God" isn't a priority for any government anywhere, until after a disaster of this nature because there are just too many competing priorities. We don't have the complex weather forecasting systems and storm warning notifications and Hurricane Hunters flying planes into the eyes of hurricanes in the Caribbean because we are rich. We have them because we are rich AND we got tired of people dying in hurricanes and tornadoes and floods.

Another sad fact is that all the people who are expending their energy trying to make me feel bad because this is my fault because I live in the decadent West, will have moved on to trying to make me feel bad about living in the decadent West for some other reason in a couple of weeks. That is, in fact, the show that never ends. If those people really cared about the people in the Indian Ocean region, their energy might be better spent trying to tap into one of the things that is best about the American People: their generosity in times of crisis. Now is the time when something is most likely to be done to prevent something like this is the future and now is the time we should help.

And if you still feel guilty about living in a rich country, feel free to diminish our wealth a bit by doubling your contribution.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Thursday, December 30 2004 03:28:52 AM

More Medicated Reality
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For what it's worth, I'm back with more of this drivel.

Ok, let's assume that yesterday's young man goes on with his life doing his mostly ordinary stuff. He gets married. He has kids. He is a bit grumpy and pessimistic, but basically pretty ordinary, he thinks. Occasionally he gets depressed, but he figures that's just part of life. Then he hits one of those patches where lots of things happen to and with his family. He ends up in the hospital with chest pains. He is relieved to learn it wasn't a heart attack. The doctor thinks maybe he is depressed and prescribes an anti-depressant.

The no-longer-quite-so young man notices after a few days that there is a profound change in his outlook on life. He realizes the anti-depressants are working. He is no longer driven by anxiety and fear. He is no longer worried about what other people think of him. He goes about his life doing things because he wants to or thinks he needs to. He is no longer driven by what he thinks he should do. He feels free. He feels happy. He never wants to go back to living the way he did for all those years.

Now he is experiencing life in a chemically altered state. Does that make everything he thinks and the things he learns about life and the changes in his philosophy and beliefs invalid? Can he trust what he now thinks he knows about the world? How is his current experience qualitatively different than his LSD experience?

Conversely, the anti-depressants are supposed to be rectifying deficient neurotransmitter levels in the brain. Perhaps the 20 odd years he lived with these chemical deficiencies were the years he was "chemically altered." Maybe everything is fine now and it is those 20 years where his experiences and knowledge are suspect. Maybe the experiences of the first 20 years of his adult life are chemically tainted? Maybe it is all valid, in which case maybe Leary and Alpert and others were right when they thought hallucinogens were a chemical shortcut to the spiritual (an idea I'm not all that comfortable with as I grew up Protestant enough that I can't accept that you can take a pill and find God). And what about those moments of peak experience, those rare times like personal triumphs or the birth of a child where the brain gets flooded with endorphins and the other various components of the chemical soup that accompanies euphoria? Are those experiences valid? If you start excluding some of these event-induced chemically altered states, you end up excluding all experience that doesn't occur when you are in a normal, un-enhanced, un-stressed, un-stimulated state, and how much of that do any of us actually experience? Is it really as simple as saying that if the experience occurs due to a legal chemically altered state it is valid but if the chemical is illegal it isn't valid? That life experience gained while drunk counts, but that gained while stoned doesn't?

I don't have any answers to these questions. No matter which way I turn with these ideas, I end up affirming something that leaves me really uncomfortable. I tend toward thinking that all experience is valid, up to a point, and it is what you make of it. But then I look at some of my clients who definitely don't live in the same world I do and I'm not comfortable with that idea, either.

I just don't know. I'm not entirely convinced that I need to know (or at least that it makes a difference if I do), but I keep working at it anyway. It gives me something to do when I can't sleep.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Wednesday, December 29 2004 04:14:51 AM

Cheap epistemology and chemically induced reality
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Yesterday I was talking about the meaning we assign to experiences and whether how or whether those meanings come to be valid. Tonight I'm going to get into some hypotheticals. Keep in mind that I'm not a philosopher. I flunked one third of the philosophy courses I took in college. I'm not trying to deal with this in the sort of precise, rigorous analysis that would make good philosophy. I'm just asking some questions about things that bother me, hence the "cheap epistemology" reference. Anyway this is not about scholarly precision, its just ordinary, everyday perception of reality.

So, lets assume there is a young man. He's a mostly ordinary guy, floating through life, doing ordinary young man stuff. He is happy, sad, angry, frustrated... all the ordinary kinds of states of mind ordinary young men experience. He never gives thought to the matter. He accepts what he experiences and what he learns about life as valid.

One day this young man heads out to the country. On a riverbank near a railroad bridge he takes LSD. His perceptions alter radically. He begins to hallucinate. He can see the grass growing. He can see the bridge bending and the sky underneath the water as the river inverts.

Eventually, he experiences a profound sense of oneness. He is not in the world. He is the world. He is part of everything. He is the growing grass, the buzzing flies, the river flowing, the breeze blowing. He looks around and is certain that everything is as it is supposed to be. The sky as it is, the tree just so, the particular bush in just that place, the dead deer carcass by the edge of the river, everything is just as it should be. As it needs to be. As it was meant to be. He sits there savoring the experience for an indefinite amount of time. Never during the experience does he get so lost that he doesn't remember that it is chemically induced. There is always a little voice in the back of his head saying," isn't that an interesting hallucination."

Having experienced something he imagined to be akin to oneness with the universe, even if chemically induced, he developed an affinity for eastern religion, which he pursued with varying intensity as time went by. The question is, was that experience valid. Are the things he thought he learned during that experience real and meaningful? What about the things he experienced later because his chemical experience left him open to the ideas he found in his study of eastern religion. Or are these invalid because their precursors were chemically induced? Are the changes in his faith valid?

Tomorrow: more altered states.

 

by Cziltang 
Posted: Tuesday, December 28 2004 03:42:04 AM

A Wonky Christmas and Epistemology
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Well, my Christmas entry was, in retrospect, probably not the most tasteful thing I've ever done. I apologize to anyone who was looking for something meaningful and uplifting, but then again, if you were looking for that on my web site you probably deserve what you get. And, in what must surely be a karma thing, if it makes anyone feel better you can take comfort in knowing that our Christmas Day went completely wonky a few hours after I posted that nonsense.

The Head Rat has seizures infrequently, but started having them Christmas morning. It isn't life-threatening or anything, but it isn't something she wanted to be doing under the Christmas Tree, so to speak. So, I sent Rat, Jr. off to Grandma's to do the traditional family thing with the rest of my family and the Head Rat and I stayed home while she recovered. I won't say we didn't miss the traditional thing, but it was kind of nice to spend the day quietly at home. She's been through a lot in the last few years, so it wasn't all bad. And, my Mother sent home a huge box of leftovers with Rat Jr., so we didn't miss out on that tradition.

While we were home, I started thinking about how we experience events. I know that the Head Rat doesn't remember everything that happens while she is having a seizure and I was thinking about how it is that she remembers the pieces of the things she does remember compared to how I remember the same events from a different (and obviously more comfortable) perspective. I've been thinking for some time about how we assign meaning and experience "reality" under different conditions. Without getting into heavy details and the fine points of Epistemology, I'm just thinking about how we assign meaning and more importantly how (or whether) we should consider our assigned meanings valid under certain circumstances. Most people are familiar with the phenomenon of police reporting that interviews with several eyewitnesses to an accident will all describe the event differently. There is, at least theoretically, an objective series of events that occurred up to the point of the accident (unless you get into the realm of those philosophers who deny anything external is real, but I am, if nothing else a pragmatist, and just can't let go of the idea of an objective reality, so I'm going to stick with it). Different people assigning meaning to (partially?) perceived external events. That's sort of where I'm going with this, but in the end, I don't really know about how anyone else perceives anything, so I'm sort of stuck talking about how I perceive things under different circumstances in the hopes that it is descriptive enough to get my meaning across.

I have some particular circumstances I want to talk about, but I haven't quite finished fleshing out the essay, so the meat (or meat-substitute, if you are a vegetarian) of this discussion will have to wait for later.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Monday, December 27 2004 04:34:24 AM

Captain Obvious strikes again
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I've mentioned before that I run a website for my work. It's always been kind of awkward for me. It was supposed to be a place where various managers in our department would post essays and comments about the things that were happening at work. As it turned out, I've been the only one to write anything for it, so it has mostly become a sort of "Corrections 101" page for my staff. A lot of them are fairly green, by corrections standards and I thought it was a good idea to introduce them to some correctional theory and research that they might not be aware of.

The problem is that I'm not comfortable telling staff, "I just wrote another brilliant essay, so you should go read it..." But it kind of works that way (OK, minus the "brilliant" part). Still, it is perilously close to self-aggrandizement and while I'm not above a little of that, it just doesn't seem right at work.

I was talking about web sites with one of the staff tonight. I was trying to explain how RSS feeds work, since he has a news aggregator at home, but didn't know that he could get feeds from web sites other than just news outlets. So he asked me, "Why don't you do one of those for the work web site?"

I'm sitting there thinking, "Why didn't I think of that?"

10 minutes worth of work here at home, and I've solved my "self-aggrandizement" problem. Except, of course, now I have to tell all of them about it...

by Cziltang 
Posted: Monday, December 27 2004 04:20:18 AM