As a person, I walk this Earth for some eighty years. Born of my parents, I thrive, suffer and die. As one of billions, I think, speak and act, a tiny yet distinct fragment in a societal mosaic. In my travels, I behold magnificent sites, listen to bewitching sounds and otherwise take in my surroundings. Seen this way, I am a body harbouring a mind. This person is experiencing anxious times in a world turned upside down.

Beyond this human evidence, I suspect there is more to me. I appear ill equipped to fathom just what that is, but in magical moments I can conjure a glimpse of my greater self. It is only an image, a pale representation of the ungraspable, but it holds and fortifies me. No matter whether it is a window on reality or a useful metaphor: when I access it, my world calms, and I process events with less neurotic waste of energy.

Water
In one such moment, I imagine myself as water — not just some water but Water, all the H2O on and around this planet of ours.

When I picture myself as Water, I traverse the sky in cloud guise, sometimes puffy and white, others thundering and charcoal. I hang, muggy, on humid days, beading the outside of a cool lemonade glass. And I fill that glass, mixed with other substances. I float in cubes on the drink’s surface. On high, my vapour drifts, pregnant, until I gather in drops, ice pellets or flakes. Then I fall, for months at a time in Southeast Asian monsoons, hardly ever over deserts’ crust and dunes.

As Water, I cover the poles and mountaintops, cold and solid. I swirl in dancing spirals when winds whip my powdery form from its sparkling blanket on moonlit meadows. Frozen, I flow, glacially slow, thick and white, until I melt on Everest’s lower slopes. Or I crumble as giant bergs into myself, the sea.

I, Water, move as awesome waves in the Southern Ocean, as a short-lived vortex at the swish of a tuna’s tailfin. Lightless and heavy, I rest in trenches eleven kilometres beneath my own surface, which covers three-quarters of the Earth.

I trickle in clear streams. As languid river or rushing alpine cascade, I descend, seeking my ocean self. Fallen rain, I soak the soil, pool in lakes. And I gather in Life, composing and moving through plants and animals, microbes and fungi. Falling over turbines in furious torrents or rising through them with steaming force, I power human endeavour.

In my Water fantasy, I am the hydrosphere, a water world that bathes, cloaks, permeates and connects everything on and in the Earth’s skin. I take vastly different forms, appearing as countless seemingly separate instances. I may be a dewdrop poised on the tip of a drooping leaf, but I am not only that. No matter where, when or how I manifest, I am also all that Water is.

Life
Water outlives and transcends all its forms, but it is not separate from them. How much truer is this of Life?

The lion, the wildebeest, the bacterium, the chicken and the egg are instances of Life. Each lion. Each chicken. Life manifests as the rose, the beanstalk, the truffle and the hemlock leaf. It has cycles and phases. Life consumes and repurposes itself. Life is Ouroboros — the mythical snake eating its own tail.

Yes, the good Samaritan, the executioner, the rich man, the caring mother and the naughty child are Life. Alongside the majestic, Life’s forms include the unkind, the ignorant and the unfortunate. Good and evil sit comfortably in Life’s arms. Innumerable instances of every being I can imagine, these are Life’s equivalents to Water’s drops, flakes, bergs, floes, clouds and mists.

In Life, as Life, an embryo becomes a child (or a cub or a calf…). Life takes care of digestion. It breathes in all its forms. Life fights, flees or freezes when it meets threat. In some awkward cases, like mine, it contemplates itself.

This blessed life
I am a tall, bearded man in London, UK, but is that all I am? If Life both composes and transcends any life, as Water does the dewdrop on the leaf, what does that mean for me?

This man was born and will die. Each of his thoughts and feelings has a beginning and an end. Each experience he has arises and passes. If he is an aspect, a fragment of Life, which am I? The man or Life? I know I am alive because I think and feel, because I experience living. Does the man do that, or does Life? Might Life do it through the man?

The New Testament invites a parallel consideration of Jesus as the Son of God. Was Jesus a man or God? Were Father and Son two entities? Perhaps God lived on Earth as Jesus. Might the Father and Son be One, because the Son is a very special manifestation of the Father? The Father may be God in transcendence; the Son, God made imminent. Could that apply to us all as God’s children, a truth Jesus’s story can help us realise?

I’m no biblical scholar, so I give only my lay interpretation. It matches my vision of Life manifesting through every life. Life lives as each life, including this man’s. I am man and Life. The man only exists as an expression of Life. Life only ever appears as a specific being, looking out and experiencing from a particular perspective. Each needs the other. They are two sides of the same coin.

Sometimes, Life, as a life, recognises this truth. If that life is an awkward, self-contemplating one like mine, this recognition may allow it to relax and surrender to Life in even the most challenging times. My life may glimpse itself in the image of the dewdrop — suspended, a liquid prism glistening for some time at leaf’s tip, then falling to earth and continuing its journey as Water, to Water.

It's okay to not be okay.

Will this novel coronavirus reach you? Will you contract its disease, COVID-19? Might your parents? Other loved ones? If so, who will survive? Who won’t? Will you be able to pay your rent or mortgage in the coming months? When things return to ‘normal’ again, will you have a job? What will that new normal look like?

The enormity of these questions and the obvious strain they place on us can have a liberating silver lining.

No one is secure
We are swamped by more uncertainty today than we’ve ever encountered. Isolated and half-informed, we face a deep insecurity that was unimaginable only weeks ago.

The threats and risks before us remain unevenly distributed. This disease is particularly harsh toward the older and less well among us. Our sudden economic contraction hits some sectors harder than others. Those individuals and families who’ve only just been scraping by are most likely to fall behind as resources run short.

Still, in a sense we’ve not felt before, this crisis threatens everyone. With a virus this nimble and an economic shock this comprehensive, neither fame nor family name guarantees immunity. COVID-19 respects no border, favours no religion, exempts no employment status, makes no credit checks. Nobody knows what next week or next autumn holds for them. You do not have personal security, but you are not alone. No one is secure.

No one has ever been secure
It’s true; the world is different than it was at the end of 2019. In their details, our lives have shifted immensely in just a few months.

But drawing back, we see that our reality, writ large, is much as it has ever been. Any sunrise might be the last for us or our loved ones. The comforts we’ve counted on can slip away or be taken from us at any point.

In any one of those thousands of showers we’ve taken, we might have slipped and cracked our skull. We’ve driven countless miles and could have crashed spectacularly through no fault of our own (or through a single silly mistake on our part). Among our many stormy nights, a lightning strike could have found us. Triggered by who knows what, a mutation in our cells could have set off a cancerous cascade. Our employers could have gone under despite our best efforts at work, casting us into the ranks of the unemployed. Flood could have taken our homes. Our investments might have gone sour, evaporating our retirement dreams. In fact, most of these things have befallen people we’ve known.

Even the prospect of global destruction is not new to us. We lived for decades with the threat (still very real) of nuclear war consuming our civilisation. NASA and others have long scanned the skies for asteroids that could do to humanity what we suspect one did to the dinosaurs.

You see, we’ve never had security. None of us. No matter how much we want some things to stay the same, everything changes. No pleasure we enjoy is guaranteed to continue. We can beaver away to create small niches that seem secure and within a certain range of conditions might make us more secure than others. But whether we call it Life, the universe, reality or God’s will, there is a whole of which we are a part. As a part, we can’t bend the whole to our will. Neither can our intelligence wrestle the unfathomable complexities of nature to certainty. We can’t chart an untroubled life, let alone deliver on the plan.

You have never been secure. No one has ever been secure.

Now, you can drop the mask of security, the pretence of certainty
This coronavirus is not a gift, but there may be silver linings. One is that the health and economic threats posed by the virus are so in-your-face that there is no way to pretend, even to yourself, that things are fine.

We spend so much of our lives in this charade of okay-ness, but we don’t realise the enormous energy we waste on it. It’s a self-perpetuating force in our society. Why?

We see our friends and colleagues projecting an image of strength, solidity and well-being. Yet we have an underlying sense of doubt, anxiety and malaise. “I must be messed up,” we tell ourselves, “The one misfit who feels this way.” This thought that everyone else is okay while we are not magnifies our unease. We put on an act to hide our vulnerability and look as with-it as others appear. We reach a point where we can’t even admit many of our weaknesses and insecurities to ourselves, so we expand the make-believe to deceive not just those around us but also ourselves.

But very rarely, something truly awful and overwhelming on a global scale emerges. This novel coronavirus is one of those events; the last of this magnitude was the Second World War. In the face of such cataclysmic threat, few of us can keep our mask in place.

Here is the silver lining. We see the mask slip on others. What has always been true becomes obvious: no one is secure. As we recognise that, we realise we are not solitary screw-ups in a world of comfortable and self-assured people. We are just like everyone else. As the masks around us start to falter, we might invest less in our own. We may begin to re-capture and divert the energy we’ve spent maintaining our projected image. Where might we apply it, as we admit insecurity and uncertainty, as we face our own vulnerability?

We might direct this energy toward dealing with our situation and helping those around us. We can tend to our own mental health. Recognising the importance of connection, we might reach out to those we love and to people most at risk. We can share our vulnerability and in doing so invite them to do the same. This invitation helps them free the same energy we’ve rediscovered, energy crucial to their surviving this crisis and thriving after it.

The charade of security we’ve played throughout our lives is, in a way, the pretence that we can hold the perpetual change of reality at bay, that we can secure ourselves against it. Of course we can’t. When we realise that it’s okay to be insecure, that we are not weirdos for feeling not-okay, we can stop the deception. No longer putting on our act, we can instead face and deal with this frightening and ever-changing reality. Then we’re able to help others do the same, simply by sharing our vulnerability, letting our mask fall.
​
It’s okay to not be okay. Take this chance to stop pretending. Instead, connect, share and cope.

And that's okay, because life has your back

Do you remember those amusement park turnpike rides, where you drive a car around a course, often with a small child at the wheel? Alan Watts made  an amusing analogy between one of those kiddie cars and our egoic sense of authorship in life. Here's my own version of it.

The mind is a hyperactive driver
The rational mind as a driver is hypersensitive and exacting. It, acting on your behalf, holds the wheel making continuous corrections left and right to keep the car (you) on course. Hardly a moment passes with the mind happy about the current heading. The wheel must always be engaged to correct problematic deviations from the mind's most recent assessment of how things ought to be.

Like a child in the driver’s seat of a fairground ride, the mind has good intentions as it fiddles and fidgets to drive with perfection. It means no harm. But its incessant problem-solving course corrections take their toll on the energy and maintenance fronts.

Life does the steering
The thing is, there's a rail in the middle of the lane all the way around the track, and the car cannot deviate from that path.  The child's steering has no real bearing on the car's travels. This steering wheel cannot override the guiding rail.

As at the fairground, so in reality. Life is an intelligent process that guides everything from the movement of celestial bodies to your digestion and the goose pimples on your skin. It is a single flow. You do not author a second, separate process. Life carries you just as the rail steers the child's car. It only seems, from where you sit, like you are driving. If you realised life had the wheel, you'd save a lot of energy, wear and tear.

Life travels the course, regardless of its details
The child at the wheel may wish the car moved more quickly, may think the course should be more hilly, more winding, less bumpy or less polluted. Likewise, the mind is full of ideas and judgments about life. But the course doesn't change in response to the child's wishes, and life is life irrespective of the mind's preferences.

Life travels the track. Life cares not whether the road is rough or smooth, hilly or flat, straight or winding. If anything, it seems to favour variety, with each characteristic and its opposite represented somewhere along the course.

In fact, life lays the rail, one moment at a time, in a process of unbounded creativity. 

​You are not the car; you are life.
Guess what: you are not the car travelling on the course, guided by the rail. You are the whole shebang - the car, the child, the rail, the course and the unfolding movement that is life.

For most of us, most of the time, the course is such that we feel we are only the car and our mind seems to be the driver. Really, we are the experiencing of the whole scene. The busy mind is part of life. Ups and downs, twists and turns in the course are part of life. The sense that we are driving is part of life. Our judgments about the course are part of life.

​And we are life.

Enjoy the ride!

I've been reading Michael A. Singer's The Untethered Soul, in which he expresses the need for openness very well. My paraphrase of what I take as his central message is, "All fortresses are also prisons."

We erect and occupy fortresses - be they physical, emotional, intellectual, psychological or ideological - to protect us from something outside them. And what are we protecting? Ourselves, which is to say our selves, our egos. Our egoic fortresses are the assembled constructs - collections of images, narratives and labels - that give us the impression of solidity, durability and independence from the flux of change that surrounds us. We hide in these redoubts in the hope of defining a realm of control within a vast sea in which we recognise we have none. We cower in them for comfort.

These bunkers of self-definition need constant maintenance to keep them from crumbling. The insistent flow of reality splashes against them and drags at their foundations incessantly. What else do we expect to happen when we try to set fixed positions in a reality that rushes, dancing and laughing, at and past it in perpetual renewal? Our tenets and definitions of self, based on past pain and pleasure, now frozen,  cannot help but conflict with ever-evolving reality. Which do you think wins?

But let's come back to the twin-faced nature of these citadels. How are they also prisons? Do we not see that, however effective they are in keeping out the things that might cause us pain or discomfort, they are at least as effective at denying us access to much beyond the walls that would bring us delight. Our fortresses protect our comfort at the cost of our freedom. Avoiding exposure to that which we fear, we equally cut ourselves off from much for which we yearn.

Alas, we cannot have both untroubled comfort and the freedom to recognise our own peace and wholeness.

You can read Singer, who says all of this so much better, for yourself, but I'll let you in on some good news. These fortresses are a simple matter (not the same as an easy task) to bring down. The world itself, the collision of reality against the fortress walls, will bring them down, if only we will stop shoring them back up. A further happy truth: our repair of these walls has been soaking up untold amounts of our life energy, and all of that becomes available to us if we can relax and release from our defense of them.

First posted 20 Nov 2003. It's interesting that my view has shifted significantly at the foundational level but that much at the 'so what' level remains consistent with what is discussed here. The differences?

• I no longer reduce the mental to the physical, the phenomenal to the material. If anything, I do the opposite, although I recognise that my idealism cannot be proven / validated.
  
• The first paragraph below underestimates the comprehensiveness of experience. We can't, as it supposes, 'step outside' our experiences, because anything we find 'outside' can only be another experience! We can 'objectify' by recognition that things we've assumed ourselves to BE are actually things we are experiencing, but that is a different point.
• I'm still in favour of a 'naturalistic expansion' of the self, but I no longer see nature as material.
  

We persons are special, at least on Earth, in that we have subjective experiences and are also able to step 'outside' those experiences to consider the world, including ourselves and the subjective experiences we have, more objectively. My assumption is that while many other animals are sentient they cannot take this external, objective step.

This ability has contributed greatly to our success, but it has also saddled us (or those of us with nothing better to do than consider it from time to time) with a seemingly insoluble problem: how do we reconcile our subjective feeling of an 'I' inside each of our bodies that serves as the agent of our actions, with our objective understanding of ourselves as parts of the natural world - parts made of 'standard' materials, parts operating subject to well-understood physical forces, parts constructed of reasonably well-identified sub-components with specific functions, parts whose actions are ultimately explained in natural terms without need of or room for this agent 'I'?

As I've said before in Destiny, I think that the answer to the riddle is that our subjective perspective is real but is not based in any agent of free will. Instead, subjective mental states correspond to (and I believe are caused by) specific but complex brain states, which influence and are influenced by body states. There is no free will. Yet our day-to-day, minute-to-minute belief in it cannot and should not be eradicated. I actually encourage a naturalistic expansion rather than an elimination of our concept of the 'I' behind our actions, but I won't repeat my thinking on that point now.

For now, I wanted to look at what I think is an interesting relationship between the objective and subjective, a relationship that, as far as we know, only exists through us as persons. As viewed from the furthest objective reaches, our brains and bodies (not to mention our minds) virtually disappear from the explanation of anything that is going on. The ultimate objective explanation of the dynamics around us would likely appeal to much smaller - and perhaps occasionally much larger - physical structures. Cells, genes, proteins, molecules, atoms, quarks collide, interact. Supernovae explode, singularities evolve. It seems 'we' matter not at all.

Yet without us and our fellow sentient creatures, there would be no screen for this great film to play on. The universe has created its own sets of eyes, ears and fingers to check itself out. I don't mean this in a teleological way. I don't think this was an end toward which the universe evolved - it's just one of the outcomes of the evolution. Light is seen; crashing waves are heard; slippery ice and warming sun are felt. Our animal cousins join us in this feast.

But our feast (we presume) has an additional course, for we have stumbled upon the ability to reason about the contents of our own minds. This self-consciousness opens the door to objectifying our view, not just about our own mental states, but about their place within the world around us. If I tie this back to the big picture, it means that the universe has created not just a set of video recorders but also a set of computers (who in turn have created computers, but I won't get into the role of technological evolution), capable of examining the rest of the world, describing (if not explaining) its past and predicting its future. Within very limited bounds, we recorder/computers also alter its future, but once again, from the ultimate objective standpoint, this is not so special.

The thing that is special is the existence of recursive subjective states, even if you believe, as I do, that they are epiphenomena of physical states. Their existence is uniquely confined to sentient beings, and a subset of them exist only in persons. They are only ever effects, never causes, yet they are remarkable. Although the history and future of the universe can be explained without reference to them, although they are in one sense redundant, although they never outlive the physical body that causes them, the universe would not be the same without them.

And let's unbundle them to individual minds. Consciousness, coupled with memory and intention, constitutes an individual window on the world in each of us. Once again, this is not teleological. We don't exist to provide this window. Yet each of us provides one none the less. Although the 'self' derives from wholly physical causes, it takes flight in the emergent magic of sentience and self-consciousness. Your subjective experience of the world is what makes you special among the rocks and trees.

Only you enjoy that unique show. There is no objective observer, but if there were, he would be able to explain your every action in physical terms. He could trace every atom of your existence backward to the Big Bang and forward indefinitely. He could pinpoint the arrival, manipulation and transfer of every idea by neurochemical, mechanical and electromagnetic means. But he would not be able to comment at all on what it was like to be you. That is what makes our living moments special among all the moments in which our constituent particles and their interactions have existed and will exist.

We are objects, with pasts much greater than our age and futures more enduring than our life expectancy. But we are special objects, each with a unique subjective window on the world. And within your window is yourself, both as subject and as object. A frame in a frame in a temporary frame.

First posted 17 Feb 2004 - This film covered a lot of ground. It may have lacked rigour. It may have made insinuations that outreached any fact base. But you can't deny it prompted questions and presented interesting material in relatively digestible form. My own views have shifted significantly from those I held at the time of this review. Some are now closer to the film's, some still not.

Having seen 'I Heart Huckabees' on Sunday, I saw a preview screening of 'What the Bleep Do We Know' this evening - quite a philosophical week.  'Bleep' will probably launch properly in London in March or April.

Well, Bleep certainly covers a lot of ground.  I am on board with the need for a paradigm shift - from one dominated by the residue of our longstanding and recently ended infatuation with major western religions to something that retains the connection with the numinous while using what modern science has to offer. 

I have to say that the paradigm I envisage differs in a fundamental way from that suggested by the film, but it also shares much ground.  Irrespective of whether I or anyone else actually subscribes to the film's specific direction, it is a must see - simply because it is so thought-provoking.

Particular items that caught my attention or stirred a reaction were:

• The interpretation of Quantum Mechanics as demonstrating the pre-eminence of mind and asserting the observer's role in creating and defining reality;
• The asymmetry of the arrow of time;
• The neuro-electrical and neuro-chemical constituents of learning, habituation and addiction; and the implications for how we can improve ourselves;
• The description of the visual process, or more broadly, the assimilation of new information;
• The chemistry of our cells and implications for overcoming internal and external chemical addictions;
• One specific statement regarding cells being conscious (because each 'takes a perspective');
• The rejection of an objective good and bad;
• The rejection of western conceptions of a personal God and the support for an eastern or pantheistic approach to spirituality.

Quantum mechanics (QM)
The film starts with a strong version of the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM, which says that sub-atomic particles cannot be said to exist independent of observation.  Unobserved, 'they' exist only as potentials, the probabilistic evolution of which is well defined by a mathematical construct called a wave function.  In this wave form, the 'particle' exists as a weighted superposition of all its possible selves (with different positions and momentums for each potential self).  Only upon measurement by an observer does the wave function 'collapse' to a unique particle with definite characteristics (not all of which can be known to arbitrary accuracy at the same time).  This interpretation obviously gives a special role to the 'observer' in nature.

This is combined with a specific view of the self, one in which Mind stands outside the laws of material nature and in a position of primacy relative to the material world - literally Mind over Matter.  I guess you could say the film was espousing an Idealist as opposed to a Realist (read materialist) view of the world: thoughts, ideas, intentions and emotions are the primary building blocks of the world, not atoms, molecules and cells.

The film intertwines these two propositions and draws the conclusion that we each create reality everyday.  Further, by adopting more positive attitudes and engaging in more positive thought patterns, we can impact the material world around us to make our world a better place.

As you'll know if you've read my articles on QM (If you think you understand this, then you don't, Quantum Determinacy, Problems with Quantum Orthodoxy, and Revisiting the Quantum - information please) and the Self (Who Am I?, Destiny, Subjective Objects), I disagree fundamentally with each of the two propositions above.  I am a causal realist at heart, believing that there is an objective material world that exists independent of us and that subsumes us.  And although I think that the Mind is awe-inspiring, I think that it is wholly resident in and reliant on the body.

So without going into any refutations of the film's positions (because I've discussed that in the articles I've mentioned), I'll just say that the film's position on those dimensions does not resonate with me.  I don't view either of them as absurd in their own right.  However, I do think that the leap to the overall conclusion about our ability to literally impact matter and space with our minds is a bit far.  QM's interpretation is still a mystery, with many holding views close to the interpretation cited in the film and some holding views closer to mine.  Consciousness is also a puzzle, with clear-thinking people on each side of the Idealist - Realist debate.  However, just because QM and consciousness are both unexplained doesn't mean that they are related to one another in any way, let alone a causal tie as blunt and direct as the film proposes.

The Arrow of Time
One of the contributors pointed out the peculiar asymmetry of time.  Most (I don't know whether we call say 'all') of the mathematical formulae that so accurately describe the world around us are indifferent to the direction of time, working just as well backwards as forward.  Yet we can only experience time in one direction.  We can (if we can trust our memories) have knowledge of the past but not of the future.  We are troubled by the thought of our not living into the unending future, but we have no problem with the fact that we were not alive for the many thousands of years before our birth.

Some (but not this contributor) have suggested that time's arrow is tied to the second law of thermodynamics, which says that in a closed system, entropy increases over time.  Entropy MUST increase as time moves forward, so perhaps this irreversibility drives the same irreversibility in time.  But upon closer inspection, entropy's increase is not absolutely necessary: it is only probabilistic.  It just so happens that the universe began in a relatively ordered state.  Since there are many more (uncountably so) disordered states than there are ordered ones, entropy's march is staggeringly probable - NEARLY assured.  Yet that is not the same as being necessary, absolute.  So... if we are to tie time to entropy, we would also have to accept that time's direction is not irreversible in theory, but is only practically guaranteed by the high probabilities discussed above.

The Brain and learning, habituation and addiction
Several contributors discussed the role of neural pathways or networks in our behaviour.  We reinforce the formation of certain sets of connections through our habits.  The reinforced sets 'wire' themselves to respond to the frequent call for their combined performance.  Other possible combinations, if not called upon, do not wire themselves up.  We can, through conscious habituation, re-wire some of these networks (e.g. the ones associated with more positive outlooks, more pleasant moods, more confident postures and more successful behaviours).

And this electrical component is accompanied by a chemical one, with parts of the brain creating (or causing to be created) different chemicals for different needs.  Just like we can become addicted to external drugs, we can become addicted to some of these internal, home-made concoctions.  We then engage in the behaviours and nurture the states of mind that give us our fix.

The important point is that a bit of us can stand outside the fray, perhaps up on the mental balcony, observing and intervening to break the vicious cycle.  But we have to recognise and support that bit, exercise it and have confidence in it.

I don't know the science well enough to comment on the accuracy of this 'folk' version of it, but it doesn't seem outlandish; in fact, it jibes quite well with the rough understanding I have from some previous reading.

I'll see it when I believe it
One scene is built around the story that the natives in the  Caribbean did not see Columbus's ships as they sailed in, because they had no visual or mental construct for a ship.  The more general point is that we cannot see or accept things that do not already exist in our mental model or paradigm.

To be honest, I don't buy the foundational story at all.  I can accept that the natives would not know that the ships WERE ships.  I can understand that they would be confused as to what these dark patches on the horizon were, confused by the shapes they became as they grew closer.  But I cannot believe that they literally did not SEE them.

Like everything else in the film, though, it is thought provoking.  It recalls to mind a vague picture I have of how we deal with sensory input and with anomalies in particular.  We are bombarded with sensory input, with much more than we can process, in every waking moment.  Our brains are partially hard-wired through evolution (i.e. natural selection) to help discern the useful info from the 'white noise', and our particular experiences further shape the more plastic aspects of that filter.

From our earliest days, we begin to assemble our working model of the world.  What matters?  What does not?  What framework allows us to maintain internal consistency across the broadest range of our experience - to make sense of the world?  When new input arrives that is labeled as irrelevant, we do not attend to it (unless perhaps we pay the price for ignoring it and our brains pick up on that fact and adjust the framework).  When new input fits the paradigm and is labeled as important, we attend to it. 

But what happens if new information is so far outside our accumulated experience and reasonable extrapolation from it that we can make no sense of it at all?  We tuck it away into a certain bit of the brain where it sits in a cache; at night, while we sleep and dream, among the routine brain maintenance that takes place is a re-assessment of the framework (or paradigm) in the light of any new anomalous information.  What is the smallest adjustment that can be made to the overall model in order to accommodate, make sense of, this new input?  Do we need to scrap the whole model and start anew (when rocks begin to talk or we find out that we are just carnival entertainment for some other, alien and invisible race!)?  If the accommodation necessary is too large, we may well end up just disregarding the anomaly (the Red Sox didn't REALLY win the World Series) and just continue with the paradigm intact.

So you can see that I identify more than a grain of truth in the film's underlying point here.

Junky cells
Back to the addiction theme, another segment looked at it from the somatic cell perspective.  Every cell has loads of receptors for receiving information from its environment, including the chemical drinks discussed above.  If the receptors are incessantly bombarded by some protein 'hit' they shrink and become less responsive to it, meaning it takes more of it to give the same 'fix'.  Cells can then become so engrossed in getting their next 'high' that they neglect other important functions like communication with neighbouring cells and even elimination of their own waste products.  Keep in mind that I'm talking about 'internal', not 'external' drugs here (although I wouldn't be surprised if the story were much the same for external ones).

You can tell by my over-use of analogy that I'm not up to speed with the proper science here, so I can't judge the accuracy of the scientific claims.  It does, though, appeal to common sense.  (Yeah, yeah, I know, common sense often leads us astray when we venture away from the normal life scales and conditions in which it developed.)

Conscious Cells
One contributor spoke (a bit too loosely, I think) about cells being not only alive - an assertion with which I wholly agree - but also conscious.  She said a cell was conscious because it interacted with its environment and processed chemical information.  This doesn't, for me, suggest consciousness.  Or, to put it another way, if it DID qualify as consciousness, then we would have to admit that computers and computer networks are conscious.  Perhaps we should...

No good, no bad
Several contributors pointed out that there is no objective good or bad 'out there' in the world.  A belief with which I am in agreement, as you can read in my articles: Right and Wrong, Sources of Morality, Ethical Notes, Disobedience, Pragmatic Ethics and Nietzsche's Call to Creativity.

No Personal God
All contributors who discussed religion found the creation of a person-like personal God harmful to mankind and in many instances antithetical to what they saw spirituality as. 

I tend to agree that, however powerful, insightful and well-intended the original spiritual messages are, when organised religion accretes around them, the foibles of man dilute, pollute and hijack them.

This isn't at all to say that all clergy are guilty or that all followers are silly. I just think that the more organised a belief structure is, the more likely it is to lose sight of the wood for the trees.

Re-cap
As I said, there were a number of things with which I agreed and a number of things - including the major thesis - with which I didn't.  Still I can heartily recommend 'What the Bleep Do We Know' as an interesting, challenging, thought-provoking film that may well make you want to sit down and put your thoughts to paper.

​First posted 4 Aug 2004. Reading now, I know how influenced German philosophy, including Nietzsche's, was by eastern thinking.  Now familiar with those influences, I can see them wrapped in Nietzsche's strained metaphors. Nietzsche ended up losing himself in his metaphorical labyrinth, not keeping enough contact with society and the real world to anchor him between his metaphysical flights. He saw and articulated the dangers of modernity, but his alternative was insufficiently stable for either Nazi Germany (whose leaders hijacked his words) or himself.

Nietzsche calls on us to be the poets of our own lives. Given his love of music and his belief that music brings us closer than anything else can to the raw experience of Being, perhaps the better metaphor is that we should be the composers as well as players of our own lives. Regardless - creativity is at the centre of Nietzsche's programme. He applied this to himself as well, seeing philosophy not as a field for discovering truths but for creating them.
Nietzsche didn't need to argue that objective truths don't exist, although at least sometimes he did make just such statements. He could just as well point out that, irrespective of their existence, these truths are ultimately inaccessible to us. The epistemological argument could still allow him to reduce practical truth to a battle of forces. A person defines his moral truths (albeit while being acted upon by social, cultural and individual forces around him) and then sets out to live by them. In so living, he brings his 'truths' into contact with those of others around him. Either by demonstration, persuasion, trickery or force, some truths emerge as dominant in the rich mix of human interaction.
Nietzsche has no time for democracy per se in this process, holding no great respect for the mass of humanity. The great souls will emerge from the fray and set the light by which others live. The greatest of these souls are the artists, who through music and metaphor exert the most powerful influence on the game. They set (or more often tear down) the boundaries in which the contest of life takes place. For the most part, Nietzsche believes they are - and should be - completely unconstrained in this creative act. Nietzsche held what might be called an aesthetic worldview, believing that mankind's existence was justified only by the accomplishments of its most gifted members and that nothing should limit their creative powers.
This all sounds a bit scary for the great collection of us humble enough to recognise that we are not among the earth's true shakers and movers, but Nietzsche assumed that the great men would act nobly. This mustn't be confused with any sense that the supermen would respect the common men. Nor did it guarantee that a few people didn't get squashed along the way. Nietzsche saw war as a great tool of Dionysian creative destruction that shook mankind from its slumber and re-stirred the creative forces. In his more balanced moments, he did admit that these Dionysian forces did need to be balanced somewhat by the more structured, ordered Apollonian ones - a sort of hot and cold bicameral system that could be applied to the individual psychologically but also to the world in cultural and social terms.
This all sounds a bit extreme, but we do have to keep in mind what Nietzsche saw it as an inoculation against. Nietzsche believed two things, and he believed that these things were becoming increasingly clear to people in general. First, there was no God. God had not created man but vice versa. The fact that science and scepticism were undermining faith in the numinous made him worry that mankind would be left adrift, anchor-less. Second, he subscribed to determinism in its strongest sense. At heart, none of us could choose to do other than we do. Our actions were driven not by a cause-free agent but rather by the currents and eddies of a continuous flux of forces - the Will to Power. As science increasingly demonstrated our place as part of the natural world and its causal flow, the common man would descend into nihilism - a submission to the view that nothing mattered.
Only humanity's strongest (who, in Nietzsche's view, transcended humanity to become a new type of being) could overcome this undertow and provide a new framework in which others could operate healthily. Doing so required not only casting off the shores of Christian false comfort and braving the tumultuous waters, but also choosing a new shore - legislating a new code, creating a new order. One had to embrace the knowledge of Being's flux and destiny's necessity. One had to walk mockingly on the edge of the abyss.
And of course, Nietzsche realised that he too operated within the flow of determinism. What he wrote, he wrote by necessity. Whether others were influenced by him, followed him rather than descending into nihilism, was also a matter of necessity. He, like the rest of us, was a vehicle for (or a current in) the ever flowing Heraclitean flux of existence. He embraced this as what he was and charged onto the field of battle with passion and steel.
The challenge Nietzsche saw and sought to meet posed a difficult dilemma. How do we simultaneously accept that our actions are fully determined and yet plunge into and through life with vigour and relish? We adopt the perspective of the creative front of a wave of action (for Nietzsche, more strictly, Will to Power), that defines itself, and then imposes that definition on the world. We 'become who we are.' One need accept no boundaries in the application of this creative force, save one.
This boundary is an internal one only, one imposed by the perpetual realisation that what one does this once will be relived over and over again forever. Nietzsche believed, not just metaphorically but metaphysically (in keeping with some scientific hypotheses of the day) that time recycled without end. His doctrine of the Eternal Return served notice to all that one must act such that one wills that act to repeat in perpetuity. When considered deeply, this brings very great weight indeed to moral decision making. Yet the weight does not lean toward any particular desired corner.
We can call Nietzsche to account for a certain lack of clarity in his writing, certainly when that writing is held to the standards of modern analytical philosophy. Nietzsche's answer would be a simple one - that the greatest truths are not discovered through reasoned clarity but rather brought into being by creative genius. Metaphor (our closest verbal approximation to music) is the tool of true philosophers. We can also disagree with his metaphysical commitments to a Will to Power and the Eternal Return. In my view, though, these were only one step too far. While rejecting the idea of the Will to Power, I subscribe to the view that reality is a continuous flux. As for the doctrine of the Eternal return, I prefer to view it instead that what happens now echoes in eternity - it is 'captured' in the great eternal camera reel that plays through one frame at a time. Anyway, these are also just metaphysical speculations themselves!
What I appreciate about Nietzsche's message is that while we are part of the deterministic flow of nature, we cannot possibly know what our destiny is, so we must think and act such as to create that destiny for ourselves but also for all that surrounds us, bringing ourselves to bear on the world. My choices and actions define me, yet I (not as a cause-free agent but as the sum of all that has come together in me at this moment) compose the song that is my life - this short special time during which all that is me assumes a living, sentient, conscious form.