"You cannot step into the same river twice"

The title of this entry is taken from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus.

The following are steps into a river.

2-23-03
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
The act of measuring one magnitude of a particle, be it it's mass, it's velocity, or it's position, causes the other magnitudes to blur. This is not due to imprecise measurements. Technology is advanced enough to yield hypothetical correct measurements. The blurring of these magnitudes is a fundamental property of nature.
The notion of the observer becoming a part of the observed system is fundamentally new in physics-as-understood-by-the-common-man (me). In quantum physics, the observer is no longer thought of as external and neutral, but through the act of measurement he becomes himself a part of the observed reality. This marks the end of the neutrality of the experimenter, or of "science" per se.


A lot of people are conditioned to think in very short terms. They have little or no historical sense or larger "world-view". Those who do so can be swept along by any herd mantra and ignore or forget what once was common knowledge for prior generations or eras. This new era brings with it a plethora of ways to deconstruct or forget altogether former assumptions of basic reality. For example: bumpersticker punditry, like, "straight, but not narrow", or "the religious right is neither". A democratic consensus of strategy or community becomes less and less likely.



a random quote from the intelligentsia(Slate magazine):
"The insights imputed to meditation are questionable, too. Meditation, the brain researcher Francisco Varela told me before he died in 2001, confirms the Buddhist doctrine of anatta, which holds that the self is an illusion. Varela contended that anatta has also been corroborated by cognitive science, which has discovered that our perception of our minds as discrete, unified entities is an illusion foisted upon us by our clever brains. In fact, all that cognitive science has revealed is that the mind is an emergent phenomenon, which is difficult to explain or predict in terms of its parts; few scientists would equate the property of emergence with nonexistence, as anatta does." from: Buddhist Retreat Why I gave up on finding my religion. By John Horgan Posted Wednesday, February 12, 2003, Slate magazine
(2-18-06)

my comment:
perhaps Francisco himself was, afterall, just an illusion. Perhaps his mother thought so, too, ...who, no doubt, along w/ other cognitive scientists, corroborated the non-existence of his mind...that discrete particle of unified entity-ness...our perception is a clever illusion of our perceiver(brain)...wait, ... starting to get blurry here...confused...no, maybe not...ah!
I'm a bag of chemicals, now I understand. Meaningless random atoms have achieved what the "made-in-the-image-of-God" only imagined. So fulfilled, so self-satisfied.

Self is an illusion in the sense that the story in a novel is an illusion, in spite of the empirical existence of the novel itself, or the veracity of the significance of the story. It both exists and does not exist and there is no contradiction. Just don't try to squeeze a fistful of water too tightly, and insist on always having things your own way.