Philosopher's Stone

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Originally uploaded by Noreopinephrine.

I would like to say thank you to my summer students, Ingrid and Anna. They helped me on the road to becoming a philosopher.

September 11th

Tonight at the Spiegeltent we did a September 11th memorial show. Billy delivered a very moving sermon. He talked about how we see the towers fall over and over, but it is an evil without a cause. "They hate us because of our freedom," our leaders tell us, but that is why we are at war, because we are blind to historical and political relationships in this world. We are trusting these leaders to figure this out for us, and we have to stop doing that. We have to take responsibility for peace on an individual level, to find peace in the world, in our communities, and in our selves.

Slavoj Zizek, one of my favorite phiolosophers, makes some similar statements in his comment in the Guardian. A column like this wouldn't get within 10 miles of the NY Times, I don't think. However, to be fair, there was a reasonable Bush bashing editorial in the times and a slightly bizarre survey of radical muslim blogs, reprinting pictures of muslims praying while dressed up as Coca Cola bottles. But my top pick was this architecture review, also in the NY Times, of the newly designed towers to be built at ground zero. In it, Nicolai Ouroussoff says:

[The architects] emphasize their buildings’ transparency, a tired cliché for the openness of a democratic society. But transparency is not just about openness. It’s about voyeurism, exhibitionism and surveillance, the last of which is probably more relevant than “freedom” at ground zero.

After the performance tonight we all walked to the WTC site, threw paper airplanes into the site with the last words of people who died there, and sang the first ammedment song. I'm glad we ended on that song - as far as learning the lessons of September 11th an important one to me is that we can not let freedom of expression become a casualty of war. It was important for me to bring the message of the first ammendment into a space where so many opponents to the freedom of expression have paraded in the past days.

Holographic Bodies

I was talking with Elan, my roomate who doesn't live with me, last night. We were discussing the idea that you can actually figure out things about the way your cells might work just by feeling it. I was thinking that maybe our brains are somehow holographic detectors of crystaline structures created by our trillions of cells repeating the same structures over and over and over again. Who knows. At the very least, I've got an idea for a sci-fi novel.

Then we were thinking this - if our conciousness is just projection of many many cells living together in our bodies, then 'we' are really just a side effect of our cells. And really why are we so afraid of dying? Our cells never die. Well OK, some of them do, but this is happening all of the time! And some of them are always passed on, our cells really grow as a continuum through time - father's cells mix with mother's cells out of which baby's cells grow. 'We' are just along for the ride on this never ending blob of cells. It makes me a think of a lava lamp, balls of wax rising and breaking off from other balls, forever and ever.

Undeniable though, is this big digital brain sitting on top of all those cells, and it arguably has a life of its own. And this brings us to one of my favorite topics of philosophical debate - how much of our self is in our bodies and how much is in our brain? Body conciousness may be a completely different but just as important a phenomenon as brain conciousness.

But then there is a question in neuroscience about how digital the brain actually is. There is new research that is starting to show the importance of the glial cells in neuronal function. There are 100 times as many glial cells as neurons in your brain. They don't 'fire' like neurons do, but they are chemically and mechanically connected to the neruons that are storing memories and making your heart beat. Perhaps the glia somehow represents the mind-body interface in the central nervous system and a similar dichotomy occurs between your body and the peripheral nervous system.

However, the most important question remains - how many times a week do you clean your ears? No seriously, let me know and I'll plot the results. And if it is different at different times of the year (winter, summer, etc) that is good to know to. For scientific progress!!

Run Down

To continue my saga of police harrassment - last night I almost got run over by a squad car. I was on Amsterdam Ave crossing 112th St when I heard a siren. I saw a cop car doing 60 down on Amsterdam. I thought, "it couldn't possibly turn on 112th street" so I continued to cross the street. Well, guess what? Yeah, the car swerved around the corner. It missed me by several feet, but whoah!

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.