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Exploring Solutions Space

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Perhaps the most humbling aspect of software development is the inflexibility of the machines that we control. They do exactly what we tell them to do, and when that results in disaster, there’s no shifting of the blame. On the other hand, computers do not become conditioned to your failure – they’re like indestructible puppies, always happy to try again.

That computers don’t care what we tell them to do is symptomatic of the fact that the measure of the success of our programs is in the non-digital world. Even when the engineer works end-to-end in the digital realm, such as in digital networking, the rewards come from subscriptions paid by customers that consume the content delivered by the network. In the current tech market, that is sometimes ignored. I keep on reminding engineers earning six-figure salaries that if they don’t concern themselves with the survival of the middle class, at some point there won’t be any subscribers to their internet solutions.

So we come back again to an understanding of programming that involves the complex interaction of many system elements – computers, machines, people and all the other forms of life that have melded into a strained global ecosystem where the competition for energy has been channeled forcefully into the generation of ideas.

These ideas are expressed in many ways – not just through natural and computer languages, but also in the shape of a coffee cup and the power plant that burns coal to produce electricity. The question facing us as programmers is how best to represent the interaction of those components. Obviously, we cannot adopt only a single perspective. All languages encode information most efficiently for processors that have been prepared to interpret them. In the case of a computer ship, that preparation is in the design of the compilers and digital circuitry. For people, the preparation is a childhood and education in a culture that conditions others to respond to our utterances.

This context must give us cause to wonder how we can negotiate the solution to problems. This is the core motivation for our search for knowledge – to inform our capacity to imagine a reality that does not yet exist, a reality that manifests our projection of personality. We all use different languages to express our desires, everything from the discreetly worn perfume to the bombastic demands of the megalomaniac. We use different means of expressing our expectations, from the tender caress to the legal writ. None of these forms of expression has greater or lesser legitimacy.

In my previous post in this series, I introduced the idea of a program as an operational hypothesis that is refined through cause-and-effect analysis. Cause-and-effect denotes a relationship. This can be a relationship between objects whose behavior can be characterized by the brute laws of physics (such as baseballs and computer chips) or organic systems (such as people and companies) that will ignore their instructions when confronted with destruction. What is universally true about these relationships is that they involve identifiably distinct entities that exchange matter and energy. The purpose of that exchange, in systems that generate value, is to provide resources that can be transformed by the receiver to solve yet another problem. In the network of cause-and-effect, there is no beginning nor end, only a system that is either sustainable or unsustainable.

The single shared characteristic of all written languages is that they are very poor representations of networks of exchange. Languages are processed sequentially, while networks manifest simultaneity. To apprehend the connectedness of events requires a graphical notation that expresses the pattern of cause-and-effect. Given the diversity of languages used to describe the behavior of system elements, we are left with a lowest-common-denominator semantics for the elements of the notation: events occur in which processors receive resources, transform them according to some method, and emit products. The reliable delivery of resources and products requires some sort of connection mechanism, which may be as simple as the dinner table, or as complex as the telecommunications system.

This is the core realization manifested in Karl Balke’s Diagrammatic Programming notation. Generalizing “resources” and “products” with “values”, the notation specifies cause-and-effect as a network of events. In each event, a processor performs a service to transform values, which are preserved and/or transferred to be available for execution of other services by the same or another processor. The services are represented as boxes that accept a specification for the action performed by the processor in terms suitable for prediction of its interaction with the values. This may be chemical reaction formulae, spoken dialog in a play, or statements in a computer programming language. The exchange of values is characterized by connections that must accommodate all possible values associated with an event. The connections are described by the values they must accommodate, and represented in the cause-and-effect network by labelled lines that link the services.

While Diagrammatic Programming notation does not require sequential execution, specification of a pattern of cause-and-effect leads inevitably to event sequencing. This does require the elimination of certain constructs from the action description. For example, DP notation contains elements that specify actions such as “wait here for a value to appear” and “analyze a value to determine what service to perform next.” When the program is converted to an executable form, processor-specific instructions are generated from the network layout.

In a properly disciplined design process, the end result is a specification of an operational hypothesis that allows the stakeholders in the implementation to negotiate their expectations. They may not be able to understand what is happening on the other side of a connection, but they can define their expectations regarding the values received by their processors. It is in through that negotiation that the space of solutions is narrowed to a form that can be subjected to engineering design.

As has become obvious in this discussion, in the context of DP analysis simple human concerns become abstracted. The technology of Diagrammatic Programming must be concerned not only with the variant perspectives of participants in the design process, but also with the perceptual capabilities of different processors, where the value “Click Here” is encoded as Unicode bytes in computer memory but appears to the user as letters on a computer display. This richness manifests in terminology and notation that requires careful study and disciplined application to ensure that a program can be elaborated into executable form.

Full implementation of the Diagrammatic Programming method was my father’s life-work, a life-work conducted by those concerned that systems serve the people that depend upon them, rather than being used for the propagation of exploitative egos. This introduction is offered in the hope that of those committed to the production of value, some may be motivated to understand and carry that work on to its completion. It is simply far too much for me to accomplish alone.

In the most detailed comparison study of its use, the following benefits were revealed: rather than spending half of my development schedule in debugging, I spent one tenth. When faced with refactoring of a module to accommodate changed requirements, the effort was simply to select the services and connections to be encapsulated, and cut-and-paste them to a new drawing. While the representation of cause-and-effect may seem a burdensome abstraction, in fact it supports methods of design and analysis that are extremely difficult to emulate on instructions specified as text.

Being Boxed In

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The management guru fad of the ‘80s wound itself up just at the turn of the millennium. This may have been due, in part, to the rise of information technology that shifted analytical emphasis away from the personality of the leader toward those directly involved in creating value. That was evident in the last book I read on leadership, which warned managers that knowledge workers would simply walk away from organizations that did not adopt collaborative management strategies.

I find myself in such a situation at this point. When I started my current job, I sat through meetings that devolved into pitched shouting matches. Such altercations were a daily event between some of my peers. When I intervened with the HR staff to bring this to an end, I exposed patterns that dated back to the formation of the company by people that used competition to maintain control of knowledge workers. Circulating to upper management an essay on triangulation and its consequences did not make me a popular person. When I put a copy of “Breaking The Fear Barrier” on my desk, they just stopped coming into my office.

They kept me on because I sat in my office and did what I do best: create a garden in an overgrown software jungle. The application that I manage, which has always been a critical part of the user’s experience of our products, has gone from being something hidden until the sale is complete to an essential part of the sales process. At the same time I have created component libraries and leveraged them to build new applications, algorithms and regression test suites. Having gone eight years without a pay raise, however, it’s time for me to move on to a place that understands and appreciates the principles that I use to understand the needs of my customers and create success for them.

So I’ve been working on my resume and trying to visualize the kind of place that I would find success in. I have a certain sympathy for Microsoft, and went out to the Research site on Saturday to see whether I could put up a resume. The site indicates that researchers are expected to be recognized experts in their field with a substantial body of publications. Well, shoot, most of my career has been spent in top secret facilities or in small companies that use trade secrets to protect their intellectual property. Microsoft Research does have a category for applications developers, but that link led me through to the main Microsoft site.

And so I find myself where I was eight years ago: a really smart guy who was told by an honest recruiter that “if I knew someone starting an R&D program, you’re the guy I would recommend, but you just don’t market well as either a manager or a software developer.” Where most developers focus on coding efficiency and the arcane syntax, most of my effort is invested in understanding the application domain so that I write the right code. Whether it’s produced in JavaScript or C++ or C# is pretty irrelevant – once I’ve established the design, I evaluate and select an implementation platform, read a book, start writing code, and use the web to find answers to arcane syntax questions when they come up.

Most hiring managers don’t have a clue how to evaluate a person like me. They want a known quantity – a specific skill set that will allow someone to come in and deliver value on day one. They’re not willing to take a risk on learning, and don’t know how to evaluate that capability by probing past experience to determine whether a resume represents individual contribution, or simply takes credit for work done by others.

So I’m resolved to find my own opportunities this time – searching the web for job openings and pushing my resume through directly. I’m making culture an explicit issue by declaring that my loyalties lie first and foremost with the customer.

To those of you who have been following this blog, this probably resonates. I’m hard to pin down because I don’t specialize narrowly. Rather, I examine relationships (personal, institutional and intellectual), and advocate for deepening them where others pick a side. But, damn it, I don’t want to be in a conveniently packaged box that can be moved easily around (itinerancy being the biggest problem faced by software companies). I want a home, and I’m willing to meet people where they are.

Purging Psychopathy

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When I was on travel in Portland a little over a year ago, I encountered a woman in recovery from an abusive relationship. As she described it, the most terrifying part of the experience was being abandoned by her family and friends.

While the most visible of our psychopaths seek temporal power, I think that this evidence confuses our response to them as personalities. The mechanisms of temporal power are useful only in that they can be used to induce fear in the victim. The victim, believing that there is no escape from their prison, ultimately surrenders their soul to be infected by the psychopath.

I have myself felt abandoned on more than one occasion. The ties of love, unfortunately, are a two-way street. Through them comes solace, but if we aren’t strong enough to keep the predator out, venom can flow back the other way. Often, it is those who have been most secure in their relationship that provide the most productive target to the predator. They lack defensive skills, and their personality is deeply embedded in a rich field of supportive relationships. The lady in Portland was ostracized by those seeking to protect themselves. In more primitive societies, the victim of rape might be “put out of her misery.” (The movie “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” explored this in a more contemporary context.)

Fear is an incredibly effective tool for acquisition of temporal power. Apart from certain privileged elites, almost every human society has been dominated by this dynamic. Even where established, the fragility of that privilege is evidenced by the tens of millions of people displaced by insurrections around the world. Guerrilla armies that do not seek to establish and defend fixed boundaries are almost impossible to control (witness IS, al Qaeda and the Boko Haram).

So how is the religious avatar to deal with this situation? The approach advocated by most is to “Render unto Caesar.” They surrender temporal power and gather to themselves the “weary and burdened,” those beneath the notice of fattened predators. But as that cohort grows, sooner or later the predators are enticed to feast on the spirits of the protected community. The avatar is then confronted with the reality that his charges are not strong enough to keep the predators out.

The challenge is faced by any individual seeking to sustain a blessed community, even if that be only a family or kindergarten classroom. This has been my challenge over the last twenty years. For a long time, I fought against the predators that surround me. They feel the power of my mind and the strength of the loving associations that I evolve through my writing, dancing and meditation. They create conflict in my life and then plead innocence as I fight back against their influence.

For the last seven years, I have woken up every night in the wee hours of the morning to take up consideration of this dialectic – the dialectic of “blame the victim” that becomes so convincing as the history of a relationship with a psychopath evolves. The psychopath focuses on the wrongs that have been done to them in the recent past, attempting to bury the seeds of the evolution of conflict behind a psychic wall. They use that wall to fence out the beloved community, to suck away the energy that we have accumulated through loving.

So two nights ago I took up a different tack: I simply announced, “I’m really tired of thinking about you.” I listened to praise music as a means of re-affirming the principles that guide my loving relationships, and I pushed methodically against the massed predatory presence. I forced them to the outside of my mind, and re-established the connections to my beloved community. When the poison began to seep back in, I visualized the arrival of guardians to turn the tables on them.

And last night, for the first time in seven years, I slept peacefully.

Dissolving

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I began blogging back in 2003 at Zadz/Gaia/A New Gaia. That early writing I characterized as my “spiritual travelogue.”

We all carry history forward from our past lives. I have brought a deep reticence regarding the influence that I have over people. My father asked me one day “Brian, do you understand how you keep on finishing people’s sentences for them?” When I said that I did, he asked whether that wasn’t a talent that I could use to accomplish a lot in the world. I replied, “Well, but that wouldn’t be fair.”

And I was focused on other things. I didn’t understand why until I was about forty two, but I spent most of my life pursuing knowledge of the world. While I was working on my Ph.D. thesis, I was reading the Christian Science Monitor and Science cover-to-cover every week, as well as the monthlies Scientific American and Foreign Affairs. I told my father that I was trying to reduce the world to an integral to be solved. There was a certain anxiety about it, and when I came into my spirituality, I realized that I had been running as hard as I could to find a way around, under or over a wall of pain that was crashing down on us.

As the millennium turned, I became frustrated with my failure, and began to express derision and anger about the people that possessed the power to make a difference. That led to some paranoia about my relationships at Gaia. I said some things that weren’t helpful, and spent a lot of time trying to understand my spiritual landscape. We move through time together – powerful events bind us into spiritual clusters. Sometimes to take the next step forward we have to reorganize ourselves. I have done a lot of that over the last fifteen years. I suppose that to the people around me I appeared narcissistic.

The wisdom that I brought out of that period was this: People that hurt others are often walking around the world doing unto others as was done to them, hoping desperately that they will find someone strong enough to show them how to heal. And so I try now to focus on offering the best wisdom I have regarding the power of love that I have been given to experience.

Over the last seven years or so, I have been struggling against fear of love. It’s sad to me, but people do the most terrible things to themselves in the name of material success. They try their best to ignore it, surrounding themselves with shallow diversions. Then along comes love, and they see all these great big, gaping wounds in themselves. It’s kind of like a soldier in shock looking down and realizing that he’s missing both legs. They become frightened, and often simply try to make the love go away.

So I’ve been struggling with that fear and anger, and it’s been brutal. Again, I’ve said a lot of things over the last seven years that haven’t been helpful. I’ve been really fortunate to have had my Shia colleague at work. He’s finally given me some affirmation.

I feel that period of my life coming to a close now. We take anger and fear into us and it can erupt unexpectedly when we’re tired or frustrated. I’ve just kept on pushing it away, and it’s been slowly dissipating from my relationships. I realize that a lot of the people around me have been simply the tip of the spear. Many of the behavior patterns they manifest are ancient. I’ve just made it steadily clear that the love that they want won’t collaborate in those behaviors, and tried to describe the alternatives as I see them.

That’s been the thrust of my writing here. There are so many wonderful, caring people in the blogosphere. They are passionate, and sometimes that flares up in expressions of anger and frustration. I do my best to express the alternatives, and to share my confidence that there is an enormous reservoir of good will waiting for Humanity to grow up and learn to play nice.

This has been coming to a focus for me. I went out to a new social venue on Thursday night, and had to rise above some unwanted attentions in the early morning. When it was over, I felt this beautiful glow in my heart, and the world appeared next to it. I wasn’t entirely awake, which always leaves me open to suggestion. For whatever reason, I began making circles around the world with my heart: around the equator, and two circumpolar passes that divided the globe into eighths. It was just the most beautiful thing – my heart was filled with warmth and peace.

But now I don’t know how to describe what I am about or why. It’s a raw energy that courses through me. I can explain why I do what I do, but that explanation means nothing without the axiom of that relation. I don’t know how to describe it, and I can’t prove that it exists. When I feel it moving through me to someone else, the common reaction is one of disbelief.

So I feel like I’m dissolving, adrift in this deep ocean in which food and cars and buildings simply sink out of sight. There is nothing left but the raw flame of the friends that have chosen to draw close to my heart.

Thank-you all for your company!

Planning Your Mid-Life Crisis

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To be blessed is to receive gifts before knowing that they are needed. I’ve survived several mid-life crises thanks to wisdom I received from Delorese Ambrose back in my mid-forties.

Ambrose wasn’t speaking about mid-life crisis, although the context may have warranted it. My employer, a large national laboratory, had discovered that scientists might be motivated to master project management, but very few of them mastered human relations. During an era of declining budgets for basic science and a reduced role for nuclear weapons in national security, people needed to learn how to work together so that new missions could evolve.

Ambrose came in as a management consultant, which in part involves providing an organization with a framework to facilitate selection and support of leaders. In a plenary session, Ambrose spoke about the cycle of power. Her model had six stages, each stage involving a ground-breaking shift in perspective that made it almost impossible for people at one stage to understand the behaviors and priorities of those at the next. In many respects, the structure echoed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but the cycle as Ambrose presented it illustrated the dependencies of those at the upper reaches on the strength and success of those below.

When I sent Ambrose an e-mail, I was given to rue that I had passed the “sexy” part of the arc she described. The cycle begins without power, an existence in which almost every waking moment is concerned with the basics of survival. It ends with wisdom, in which enormous influence is contingent upon the continued success and good will of the community we serve, and thus power again is (paradoxically) elusive. The “sexy” stage – the stage at which we can be assured of getting things done – is at the half-way point of personal achievement.

Achievement evolves from association when our peers recognize that we have unique skills and traits that can be supplemented to create a competitive advantage for the community. This is the first true stage of leadership, and the leader often believes that it is due to their initiative that the organization succeeds. But the reality is more subtle. Success grows from the meshing of behaviors acquired through years of adaptation and compensation. The uniqueness of the leader’s innovative drive requires that others adapt that urge to the rest of society. In that process, they gain unique insights of their own, and become qualified to take their own turn in the sun.

When that time ripens, the leader feels abandoned. I observed several people wandering through this period of their lives, and the experiences were terrifying. It is to watch an individual in the prime of life, at the full height of their powers, watching the end of a life that they have struggled valiantly to obtain. It is like dying, and some will go so far as to destroy others in their attempts to avoid the inevitable. Among our commercial captains are those that are masters of this art, methodically exploiting middle layers of management in order to sustain reputation and position.

The end, when it comes against such resistance, is crushing. The individual is left without support or purpose. Those that studied their methods no longer need them. Lee Iaccoca was inspired to run for president while thus adrift, wandering the halls of his mansion. My mother spoke of retired businessmen who, working as fundraisers for the American Cancer Society, had never learned to book their own travel.

The exit from this stage is self-knowledge. It is, ultimately, the realization that it wasn’t simply the things that we did that brought us success. It was rather our ability to adapt to the constraints of success. When first mounting the ladder of achievements, that process happens organically. The changes in ourselves occur one step at a time as needs are presented. We often fail to recognize that those changes were indeed choices. We could have chosen to take that second honeymoon, rather than flying to Singapore to open a new market. We could have coached the little league team, rather than staying late in the lab to perfect a new fuel mixture. While these choices may have been formed under pressure, our decision to respond and adapt to those pressures was our choice, and the outcomes reflected our capacity to control ourselves.

Self-awareness is a taking stock of who we are, with the purpose of preparing ourselves to become the person that we want to become. From that place we enter the last two stages on the path of power. Given that we have complete control over ourselves, what is it that we want to do? What purpose do we wish to serve? And once we have entrained a community in the wake of our purpose, they then turn to us for wisdom.

So my advice to those entering mid-life crisis is, “don’t fight it.” Yes, resist it. Get as much as you can for your achievements. Allow people the time to envision a future without you. Force those that replace you to become as good as they can be.

But attend also liberation from the tedious requirements of a life that chose you into a life that you have chosen. Take advantage of the good will that surrounds you to ask “What moments with me were most inspiring to you?” Trace the evolution of those moments to recognize the strength of the choices you have made. Prepare yourself to enter again into the furnace of self-creation to rediscover and reclaim all the passions and dreams that were surrendered so that others could share in your success.

But for heaven’s sake, don’t succumb to the sad spectacle of trying to repeat your unreflective youth!

Can ‘We’ Be Selfish?

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I need to try this argument out, because I am being driven crazy by a pattern that has developed in my conversations with rational people.

The pattern is, when arguing about morality, to observe that I identify specific benefits to myself of caring for others. Those rewards (such as joy, a sense of purpose, and spiritual strength) are interpreted as evidence that I am simply being selfish like everyone else.

There are two points to be made here. The first is to assert the definition of selfishness. From OxfordDictionaries.com, we have:

lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure

In other words, to be selfish is to disregard the effects of our choices on others. When we are selfish, the survival and rights of others are of no consideration when we set out to acquire resources or satisfy our bliss. In fact, that lack of consideration is an important psychological element in preparing us to destroy others in the service of our self-interest.

The lie of selfishness is that acquisition of power and pleasure makes us better prepared to survive. Raw power can serve any purpose, but requires skill in the wielder. If we focus only on power, we never learn to channel it in acts of creation, because to create is to consume power. We are required either to share our power with those that have learned to create, or fall into the terrible abyss of acquiring resources through the destruction of the people that hold them. The latter course ultimately renders us powerless, because without people we have no means of converting the resources that we have accumulated into value.

The second point is that of the three benefits of caring for others, joy and purpose are entirely subjective. Only spiritual strength is a resource to overcome life’s challenges. But spiritual strength arises as a projection from those we serve. It is to assert “Yes, I want this person in the world.” That good will follows us around like a cloud, and pushes against the will of those that seek to harm us.

As that description makes clear, spiritual power is contingent upon our continued commitment to consider the well-being of those that affirm us. It is to assert reciprocally “Yes, I want this person in the world.” It is to surrender some of our spiritual power to them.

The proposition of “We” is that the individuals in mutually supportive communities enhance their odds of survival by distributing power. In that state, the selfish have no particular reason to target any particular individual, yet when we face difficulties we have the pool of distributed resources to draw upon. And when resources are plenty, our creative efforts are amplified by the inspiration of others.

Of course, there are no guarantees. What happens when the challenges facing the community overwhelm its resources? Who is going to survive? To the loving person, facing the loss of all that they hold most dear, the response is simply “Who would want to?”

The promise of religion, of course, is that surrendering the flesh under those circumstances opens the gates to a far better reality. The power we store in things is lost when we die. The power conserved in our spiritual relationships endures.

Why do we feel driven to believe that acting in our self-interest is selfishness? I think that rather the opposite is true: we have been so indoctrinated to believe that “greed is good” that we simply cannot accept that selfishness (the belief that only “I” have any meaning) is just a really stupid idea. Our self-interest is in nurturing a caring community. It is to submit the needs of the “I” to the “we.”

Beyond Good and Evil Round II: A Response to John Zande

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John:

The proposition of good and evil is not a functional moral dichotomy – there is simply too much conditionality in moral analysis. I think that there are really only two principles that inform a meaningful moral dialog. The first is power – the capacity to make reality conform to our will. The second is love – an irrational desire to create power in the object of our affection. Moral analysis focuses on “who are you loving with your exercise of power?” The ultimate moral condemnation is “only yourself.”

I do not deny that the world is full of pain, but that is an inheritance from our Darwinian past, which is a process free of morality. In Genesis, when the Bible heralds the Fall as the entry of sin into the world, it is to recognize a separation from that past into a future of rational moral analysis. “Adam and Eve” are a metaphor for the human struggle with shame, guilt, forgiveness and redemption (all in the context of human society – God doesn’t need to deal with these issues).

The question is whether there is a force that lifts us up from brutal biological competition toward rational moral discourse. The Christian proposition is that Jesus came and died to demonstrate that there is nothing that can alienate us from God’s love or qualify us for preferential treatment in his eyes. This was demonstrated even in the face of murder at the hands of the culture that he came most immediately to love. His victory was to create a foothold for divine love in the world, and that foothold has broadened enormously over time.

So my response to your position is: yes, things are still bad, but they are far better than they were. It is only by looking at the trends that one can form a judgment concerning the efficacy of love. I experience its power day-by-day in a world that you seem to not to experience.

You have a great deal of intellectual energy, which you seem to focus toward the purpose of creating pain in others. My experience is that such people often are “doing as was done unto them”, looking for someone strong enough to show them how to heal. I can only offer Hume’s response to Hobbes (the latter whom you echo, btw). Hobbes averred that life for most was a “war of all against all” and “nasty, brutish and short.” Hume’s response was: “Mr. Hobbes has forgotten the operation of his own heart.”

If you want a person committed to the proposition of loving to read your book, you should start by offering a testimony regarding the things that you do love. That’s a point of contact that might allow them to engage your view of the world.

As it is, those of us that love have improved enormously the condition of life on this Earth. We’re at a turning point in that process, having nearly exhausted the resources that were laid up in the past. Under those circumstances, it will ultimately be those that learn to work together that survive.

Brian

Zande’s response to this was an assertion that he was trying to clarify the true nature of the reality we inhabit. My response was:

John:

Thank you for your considered response. I find myself, however, still seeking a declaration of the allegiance of your love.

Truth is indeed terribly important. Those that divorce themselves from truth ultimately abandon power (the ability to make reality conform to our will). For those that love, the truth of suffering is an essential goad to action. But the truth is only what it is. The goal of any active intelligence is to create new truth. It is through creative action that I find greatest meaning in life, and my ability to create is largely contingent (in the “no man is an island” sense) on the good will of others. That means offering them good will in return.

From a Christian perspective: yes, in its foundational state, this creation was indeed a reflection of Lucifer’s character. But I see the action of Divine Love in the mechanisms that are provided to heal his insanity. It is the simple existence of that possibility that I celebrate.

Good luck on your journey!

Brian

Mr. Zande’s response was to ask me to remove my religion from his blog – which I found odd because the only religious statement was actually an affirmation of Mr. Zande’s thesis.

My Background in Particle Physics

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I earned my B.A. in Physics from UC Berkeley in 1982. That spring, I was asked by the undergraduate adviser where I had been accepted for graduate studies. I told him that Princeton had rejected me, and that Harvard expected me to find $10,000 a year. Face paling, he excused himself to go talk to the department head. When he came back, he said, “Here’s an application for graduate school at Berkeley. Fill this out. I’ll walk it down to the admissions office. If you don’t get accepted, don’t worry: you won’t have to pay the application fee.”

So I did my graduate work at UC Berkeley as well, receiving a Ph.D. in particle physics in 1987. There were two significant things about this era. First, it was when the fundamental ideas of particle physics and cosmology (the study of the early universe) were assembled.

Particle physics had been pursuing the use of group theory as a framework for unifying our understanding of the four forces (electromagnetic, weak, strong and gravitational). The theory had some really ugly problems. It did not account for particle masses, it produced infinities in its calculations that had to be “renormalized” away, and it had no satisfying explanation for the mathematical structure of the four forces. With the exception of the first, these problems were resolved by bringing gravity into the framework (through a Grand Unified Theory that was finally refined as superstring theory).

With regards to cosmology, the Big Bang had become dogma back in the 30s when Hubble discovered the red shift. The only available explanation for the result was the relativistic Doppler shift. The problem was that the universe was far too smooth to have been created in an explosion involving normal matter. The contribution of Alan Guth was a model of the early universe with ten spatial dimensions heated to the Planck scale, followed by an “inflation” driven by a Higgs-like particle with extremely large mass. Normal three-space and matter would only appear after the universe had cooled enormously, and light would slow down tremendously in the process. However, it turned out that there were tens of millions of possible configurations of the laws of physics in that cooling. Again, there was no way of explaining the mathematical structure of the four forces. This was addressed by assuming that our universe was only one of an infinite number of universes spawned from the original super-heated Plank plasma.

The second significant aspect of this era was the rise of Big Science in these fields. I was lucky to work on a team of eight, and turned my Ph.D. around in five years. Most of my peers worked on far larger projects, anywhere from one hundred to (at the end) a thousand researchers. The projects involved hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. Because the work had absolutely no practical utility, the arguments for funding became more and more abstract (often invoking science as a fundamental moral imperative), and then became simply political. To illustrate: the organizational success of the particle physics community, in alliance with the Department of Energy, was scandalous to the material science community, whose funding was drained to support the construction of large and larger particle colliders. The rebuttal came in the form of a proposed designer for a linear collider to study particle zoology at the Plank scale (10^40 electron volts, as opposed the the 10^15 electron volts at CERN). The sarcastic concept drawing showed a linear collider superimposed on the galaxy.

I was offered a job at BellCore (the telephone systems research lab) after graduating, but decided to give Particle Physics one more chance by joining a neutrino mass project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The woman that taught me particle theory, Mary Gaillard, was despondent. I had the feeling that she felt that I was joining the evil empire. Indeed, the nuclear weapons facilities were a vortex that absorbed a lot of talented particle physicists (I guess that DoD was worried that we’d go off and invent something even more destructive than the hydrogen bomb). So the ten years that I spent there were amidst a vital community of theorists, and I was able to keep abreast of developments in particle physics and cosmology.

I chose my position at LLNL because I knew that if particle physics didn’t appeal to me, I would be able to change careers. I did so after three years, entering Environmental Science. Unfortunately, I became married in 1994 to a trauma victim of the Soviet secret police. That trauma made it impossible for my peers to sustain their relationships with me. I was encouraged to leave the Laboratory for industry.

When I made a decision to restructure my personal life in 2000, I went through a period of enormous volatility in my career. My peers at LLNL (some of who had intervened in my personal life with disastrous effect) decided to throw me a lifeline, and I was back there in 2004 and 2005. The latter was the centenary of Einstein’s “anno mirabilus”, when he published his papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and special relativity. The speaking schedule that year was dominated by cosmologists and particle theorists. I was able, in that venue, to come up to date on current developments in the field. What I came away with was confirmation that nothing had changed, and that theorists were simply adding parameters in order to match data that they couldn’t explain, often with unsatisfactory results. It was so dire that the NSF head of fundamental physics declared that the field needed “revolutionary” ideas.

I had begun to assemble the thoughts presented here in 2000 (see the “New Physics” tab), and offered them to some of my peers. It was then that I ran into political restrictions. I was told “wait ten years,” which was the foreseeable duration of the CERN research program. Well, that ten years is up.

I did receive some recognition while I was there. During a budget cutting exercise, funding of the National Ignition Facility was threatened. I ate lunch frequently at the NIF cafeteria, and one day found myself looking at the promotional poster on the wall, wondering how to make the program work. As I sat there, I had the sense of having a conversation with researchers from a number of disciplines. When I published that analysis (several months later), the budget discussions were resolved with an increase to support new research directions, and I was invited by the Associate Director’s office for a program participant’s tour of the facility. It was the only concrete evidence I received of the political contributions I had made to the laboratory in the eighteen months that I was able to remain there.

Suppression

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She asked, “What does that card say? I can’t read it.”

“Guilt.”

She waved it off, and then, ignoring the facilitator’s instructions, launched into a description of how she would run a workshop like this.

I broke in. “Mine says ‘suppression.’ When I read it, I remembered a conversation with a man that told me it was time to ‘unleash the dragon.'”

She smiled slyly. “Dragons are powerful creatures.”

“Yes, but my power comes from a different source. That’s why what he said didn’t work. I’ve spent a long time dealing with hostility to my aims, as a means of understanding the reasons people pose for resistance. I guess that it’s time for that to end.”

Our shadow cards put aside, one of our late-arriving “tricksters” found the “maturity” card as the lodestone for our journey. To aid in activation of our shadow side, we were instructed in “shaman breathing”: two sharp inhales through the nose, and then a vocal exhale. My partner escaped to the far side of the room before we donned our blindfolds.

I knew what I needed to do, but I have always tried to keep others out of my struggle. I filled my lungs with short snorts and breathed out with a low moan. Focusing on my brain stem, I allowed it to fill with energy, placing fingers on my neck to guide it more deeply. Distracted by the moaning and grunting around me, I concluded that trying to control the process wasn’t going to work. I inhaled harshly and deeply twice, raised my face, and roared at the sky for ten seconds.

When I finished, a man’s voice exclaimed “Whoa!” But we were no longer just in the room. I was in a jungle, 140 million years ago. The air around me was filled with frightened chirps and the thumps and grunts of herbivores. The echoes of the day filled the room.

Thus began the long dance forward through time. I gloried in all the tools of the predator: teeth, thumb-claws, powerful legs and tails. We swept through the sky and water, and bestrode the land. For a time the dance became arhythmic: music did not move us – it was the twisting of the land and the rolling of rocks that punctuated our steps.

I rolled myself into an egg and listened for danger before cracking the shell. My snout dug into the belly of my prey. But the pressure of disaster dragged at me. I became the last saurian, dragging my limbs through the smoke-laden air into death.

Settling on the floor, I listened disdainfully to the shuffling around me. I had lost my body, but I still had fear. I pounded hard on the floor. I am present! The room shifted nervously. Again! I sat as a king and surveyed the herd, turning my will first this way and then that. I ruled as Emperor from the pyramids in Tenochtitlan. When Europe arose, I sent cannons into the field. After war was tamed, I rose heavenward on skyscrapers, driving my claws into the flow of money to suck energy from human industry.

And then, with a sudden startle, I realized that the game was wearisome, tawdry, boring. There was no evolution, no innovation, no change. I was sinking into abstraction, losing myself.

And then a higher understanding came to me.

“I was told this by a woman that I loved very deeply:”

It’s just a process, Brian.

“Don’t feel guilty. Destruction clears the field. It prevents us from repeating the mistakes of the past.

“Work with us.”

The back of my skull twitches. It’s trying to get back in, but we don’t need the personality any longer. Just the principle, as one among many, in service to love.

Golem

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This post celebrates submission for production of my next book, Golem. Here’s the preface:

When in 2000 I resumed my journey into faith, I found myself wondering whether people had any sympathy at all for Jesus. It wasn’t enough that he had to suffer the pain of all the wrong-doing on our planet – no, he had to be responsible for everything, everywhere.

It has been painful for me to witness the success of escalatory monotheism in public debate. Even the atheists buy into it, blaming religion for all the magical thinking and selfishness that infects the world. The contradictory evidence of the natural world seems to escape their attention – predation has an enormously long pedigree. The anti-religious seem to have no sense of just how difficult it is to heal creatures that nature has programmed to hurt each other. Religion has no magical talisman to protect us from the prejudicial instincts of our neighbors – that requires us to relate to them.

Because life is so complex, every generation seeks solutions for the problems that are immediately obvious, often failing to realize that those problems are the cracks in the solutions to uglier problems addressed by their ancestors. The misguided impulse to sweep away rules and restrictions brings a satisfying sense of activity, but it also polarizes public debate. Both sides of the struggle advertise the proclamations of hysterics, impeding rational discussion and informed problem solving.

In this famous dictum, the Catholic philosopher George Santayana characterized the problem:

Those that cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

In Three Philosophical Poets, Santayana marshaled his wisdom to illuminate the difficulties of living well. His source material, spanning two millennia, are the writings of Lucretius, Dante and Goethe. The first extolled the virtues of reason, but Santayana observes that complexity runs reason into the ground with “analysis paralysis.” Dante upheld faith in Divine Love in his allegory of universal redemption, but reliance upon forces beyond our control leads to passivity and dependence. Goethe celebrates the accomplishments of forceful will now trumpeted by the elitist libertarians of the Republican Party, but a failure to negotiate with our peers generates ever mounting resistance that eventually crushes the solitary man, and brings the pyramid of tyranny crashing down under its own weight.

My first work of fiction, Ma, celebrated the feminine virtues of intuition, anticipation and compassion as a means of escaping these traps. It chronicled the psychological struggles of men caught in the limitations of Santayana’s world-view, and their liberation through submission to the caring of their women. The parallel story of Leelay suggests the psychological experience of a woman learning to support such men.

The deus ex machina of Jesus’s appearance at the end of the book was jarring to me. I rationalized it at the time as an assertion that Christ is called into being by the harmonization of masculine and feminine virtues. But it suggested to me that there was still more to be said.

I was also aware that Ma left many unanswered questions. The strategy of its construction was actually to overwhelm reason, forcing the reader to focus on the psychological experiences of the characters. When readers complained that I left a lot of loose ends dangling, I found myself playing with ideas that would tie them together.

Thus was born Golem. As a firm believer that love is universally redemptive, the work expands upon the dysfunctionality of digital technology, still characterized here as a unique manifestation of Earth’s unstable ecology, and then imagines its applications in reconciling the divide between gods and mortals.

But at the heart of the writing is a plea for sympathy for our great religious figures. In the crushing grip of the enormously destructive forces that oppress humanity, to be a seed of light can be both humiliating and painful. Adherents to faith may seem foolish or misguided, but ultimately they serve to dissipate those contrary forces, allowing the pure light of love to be liberated for all to see.