Why We Eat What We Eat
(In Praise of the Minimalist Diet)
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
(1508 Words)
Why we eat? What kind of a question is that? Why, we eat because we are hungry! Nothing drives us to food with as much alacrity as hunger pangs. Hunger is strongest in childhood when the body most needs nutrition for growth and energy; hunger is an instinctive response of an animal to bodily needs. A classic psychological experiment put infants in front of a large variety of foods (bread, fruits, ice cream, candy, meat, vegetables, cake, cheese, milk), letting them eat what they wanted. At first, the infants went for the candy, cake, and ice cream, but later they chose to eat what a nutritionist would have prescribed for their bodily needs. Infants behave naturally to boost health, just like other animals; yet, as you grow older enmeshed in culture, hunger cannot be your sole guide to eating right; you could end up fat, with diabetes, arthritis, and heart disease.
Besides hunger, other reasons why we eat may also lead us to gain ungainly weight instead of good health: eating for pleasure, for a birthday or other celebration for feasting; eating because it's time to eat, or because the food is there in front of us on our plate; eating food offered to us by someone we like or love, someone like our mother, wife, friend, or a movie star, cleaning our plate and the plates of our children so the food doesn't go to waste; eating while watching television or a movie to relieve our tension from the drama; eating to relax from the stresses of work, family, or social connections. The reasons for eating are endless, but none of them is sufficient by itself to fully justify eating, except one.
The only sufficient reason that justifies eating is: to give our body the nutrients it needs for healthful living.
The other reasons why we eat are good too; but hunger, convenience, celebration and so forth should not divert us from the objective of giving our body the very best nutrients in the right amounts; having picked food which satisfies our body's needs, then we may seek pleasure, etc., in what we eat.
Hunger is good; when we go to our meals with a strong appetite, we smell and taste acutely the deliciousness of roasts, baked dishes, and fresh fruits, or vegetables. We eat well, we are satisfied; we digest better. If the food is nutritious, we don't want more, we stop eating when we had enough. Nutritious food is chockfull of proteins, good fats, vitamins, minerals, fiber, anti-oxidants, and phytochemicals, yet low in calories. Good foods satisfy us for several hours; but if we eat sugary snacks, white-flour products, white rice, potatoes, and other denatured, high-glycemic foods, hunger returns soon with a rebound, pushing us to eat more of the same junk. Thus we take on more fat, while our body starves.
True, the body's primary need is for energy, glucose released slowly in the blood stream from good foods, to operate the brain and other organs, especially our muscles; about 70% of the calories we take in are used that way, even without exercise. Adults need surprisingly small amounts of protein for tissue repair and fat for vitamin transport: daily about 70 grams of protein (unless you are building muscle exercising hard), and 35 grams of fats: that's three ounces of protein and two tablespoons of oil, from all food sources. Any more protein or fat we may eat is burned for energy, excreted, or converted to body fat. Burning protein or fat produces toxic ketones; with water as byproduct, burning complex carbohydrates for energy is healthier, provided we eat whole grains, fruits, and vegetables.
Having regular meals is fine too; it's a good discipline. Body and mind get ready for food at a habitual time, assisting digestion, elimination, and energy production when needed. My dad always ate at 7 am, 1 pm, and 7 pm--if he could help it. He never admitted to being hungry, considering that a weakness. His breakfast was oats and milk, lunch a cooked protein meal, usually fresh fish, and dinner, a salad; he lived to a hundred years. Start your day, then, with a rib-sticking whole-grain breakfast, and end your meals with a light dinner, early. If you eat too close to bedtime, you will convert more food to fat, because you will not use your muscles much during sleep.
Celebrating life with food in the company of family and friends is also pleasing and beneficial. A little wine helps lift our mood, as well as satisfy the palate. We should not eat in the presence of people who upset us. I never complain about the food or service in a restaurant; I just go elsewhere for a meal. It is better for our health to skip a meal than eat one in a sour, unhappy, frame of mind.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with convenience or economy in food preparation, if the nutrients, quality, and quantity are also there in our servings. Our problem is often in the quantity of food we consume.
People in rich countries eat too much, unless they are models or desperately want to look like movie stars. Studies with animals and humans show that a low-calorie diet promotes good health and extends the life span 30-80% through the activation of the SIRT-1 gene, nature's way to get animals get past food scarcities; a diet of 1200-1500 calories a day for the average adult, but containing all necessary nutrients. Ah, there's the rub! If you want the benefits of a calorie-restricted diet, you have to be very careful about what you eat. Some people follow the rule of eating a little bit of everything, including sugary and fatty foods. Well, this rule is okay as long as you are very active, eating enough to get the necessary nutrients and using the extra calories for energy. For the rest of humanity, a misstep in downing a drink, a sweet, or a piece of meat could derail a healthy regimen. It is vital that for all your meals you choose food high in nutrients but low in calories.
High-nutrient content with low calories are found mostly in low-starch, low-fat vegetables; breast of chicken or turkey, fresh fish, egg whites, non-fat dairy (cottage cheese, yogurt, milk), are fine in small amounts, but have no fiber, a very important nutrient for good digestion and hunger control. I prefer whole grain and bean products as sources of protein for good health, including tofu and other soy milk products, eggplant, dark green leafy plants, and mushrooms. Get your antioxidants and phytochemicals from tomatoes, carrots, peppers, berries, and fresh fruits. If you slip up and eat something like French fries or onion rings, marbled meat, pastry, ice cream, whole cheese, you will likely end up with two problems: you'll take in more calories than you are able to use for energy, turning those extra calories to fat; or skimp on your next meal or two, depriving your body of essential nutrients.
When planning, preparing, ordering, and eating meals, first think of needed nutrients. Still since infancy, you and I have developed certain preferences in food. We have our habits for over eating and wrong eating. We have grown up in a family with its own peculiar eating culture; we have matured in a particular ethnic cuisine, American, African, Asian, or European. Inevitably, unless we consciously intervene, we continue behaving according to personal and social habits, even though this way we damage our health.
Consciously intervene in the process of eating; exercise mindfulness (concentration) before eating and during eating; after eating allow some time for the food to leave your stomach, then seek means to exercise. Plan your meals to make them right for you and your family. Use small plates; serve small portions of protein, carbohydrates, veggie fiber, and fats; avoid buffets. Take small spoonfuls and forkfuls of food, chew well, and enjoy the flavor and aroma of each bite. Set your fork or spoon down while chewing. Count calories or portions consumed each day to stick to the longevity diet, because you want to thrive and prosper.
Remember again, to exercise before and after meals regularly. Exercise depresses hunger, while burning calories. If you have reached your calorie limit for the day, drink something with fiber such as psyllium husks, exercise, get busy with something to get your mind of food, or go to sleep. If you can keep your mind off food, sleep depresses hunger. Try prayer or meditation at bedtime. Next morning you'll have a lovely appetite for a hearty, nutritious, and delicious breakfast.
Why you eat what you eat is dictated by your background; don't take dictation which harms you, whatever its source: personal habits, family, ethnicity, or religion. It is all right to discriminate against what's destructive to your life. Be your own person, directing your actions after conscious thought to a better life with vigorous body, mind, and spirit.
Monday, February 9, 2009
The Universe of Perfection
The Universe of Perfection
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
In his “Meditations,” Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Everything is but what your opinion makes it; and that opinion lies within yourself.”
I hold certain opinions about matter and spirit, which opinions shape my life profitably. I begin by imagining a universe where everything is perfect: all matter in it has taken the form of a tightly ordered crystal, which never changes. Being a a crystal, such a universe would not be subject to the second law of thermodynamics: it would not move towards greater disorder. Energies flow inside the crystal structure in never-ending cycles sustaining the existence of vast numbers of spiritual beings, garnered from living planets everywhere. This is a universe of peace, tranquility, total security, and bliss.
The souls in such a heaven are linked together in a master mind, which sees to all their needs, immaterial as these needs are. Spirits in heaven exist in perfect harmony with each other. Yet, sometimes a soul will pine for living in a material world, with all its vibrant sensations, the risks and thrills of adventure. Then it is sent out to a planet outside the heavenly orb to experience material life once again, and procreate new bodies into which spirits may enter. The connection of the soul to heaven is never lost; after the death of the body, the soul returns to heaven to enrich it with new experiences and bring new growth to the universal mind.
I choose to think I am such a soul. I am not my body, but an imperishable spirit making its home in my body; my body is a possession like my clothes, house, car, discarded when worn out, not useful any more, replaced by a new body, or no material body upon my return to heaven. I can provide no scientific evidence for the existence of the crystal universe of heaven or even for the existence of an immortal soul in me inhabiting my material body; I find it helpful in my life to think and feel it is so. I choose to feel I am always tethered to heaven, no matter what dangers threaten my body. I am like a deep-sea diver or a space-walking astronaut with my lifeline to heaven and companions above. I am a surveyor craft landed on this planet to collect data and sensations, transmitting these to my home in the crystal universe for my fellows there to experience.
I am confronting dangers in my adventures here, yet my soul is always safe from harm; if my body is destroyed, or when it dies of old age, God will withdraw my spirit through the umbilical cord connecting me to heaven. I can experience my body aging, suffering injury, disease and damage; if I cannot prevent these ills, I am not concerned. I seek help from above and continue my life on earth as best as I can.
As I pass from moment to moment, I keep in mind that my spirit is priceless, being the immortal and important part of me; but my body, having evolved over billions of years through innumerable struggles and dangers, this body is also very valuable, deserving the best of care to survive long and well in order to serve the goals of my spirit.
Even when walking through the dark valley of death I will not be afraid; my spirit is safe with God. If my body perishes, it will be a small loss compared to the safety of my spirit. Not that my spirit can be lost, but it may be barred from heaven, and go to a different place, a place of oppressive power, anger, and cruelty.
I remember in my daily efforts that my mission on earth is justice, peace, compassion, knowledge, and wisdom; I focus on my mission: to experience many sensations, adventures, learning, arts, actions, helping my own spiritual growth and that of family, friends, and community. To continue doing so, I also want to make my body as strong, healthy, and versatile as it can be for my age and constitution so I can cope with life's mountains and pitfalls.
How do these ideas of mine differ from religious teachings? They differ because I take them as conscious choices, assumptions, or definitions; no one can argue with definitions. The test of a definition is not its truth, because a definition is arbitrary, but the usefulness of a definition in solving a problem. I define spirit, God, and heaven as I choose, because my definitions help me solve the problem of my existence, and continued survival on earth-- posssibly even beyond this earth.
Should I discover that one of my notions is a detriment rather than an aid in my life, I am ready to reject it, replacing it with a more effective notion; so does a physician when a particular medicine does not heal a patient; the physician tries a different prescription which may help, not harm the patient. This approach of mine is also very different from the various religious doctrines, which sometimes do harm, but are not erased from the scriptures by the patriarchs, except rarely. In this respect, my approach to spiritual matters is more scientific rather than religious, evolving when I meet with new facts and experiences, and not becoming petrified.
The commandments to myself are not carved in stone; I prefer to change, adapting to new trials. I visualize my move before taking it, seeing the result in perfection, sensing that I am
guided by a beam of light from above. I become keenly aware of my surroundings, my body and mind acting deliberately to do what is right, what is proper, what brings forth good fruit, and what is beautiful.
Beauty is indeed immortal, such as we find in great works of art. And my spirit is immortal, but can it change as artistic expression changes? Can my soul get better or worse? Yes, it can, just as character changes. The spirit aims towards perfection, which is not possible on earth or any other material planet; yet that goal of perfection is clear to me. I see that goal in what I think, feel, and do. I clearly visualize the perfect moves I need to make in any game I play. When I achieve that perfection occasionally, then I am “in the zone,” as athletes say. I cannot fail in that state of mind, but can only do what is right and successful.
Otherwise, what happens if my spirit changes for the worse? Can it go back to heaven? I think admission back to heaven would be barred; heaven cannot allow an infected spirit to come back. That sick spirit needs to go through lives of purification, penance, and cleansing on other planets, before being re-admitted to the crystal orb of perfection. Sometimes a soul goes so far astray, it cannot hope to enter heaven any more and is sucked into a sphere of evil, known as hell, a place of grief, agony, and slavery.
My main effort in life is to avoid the whirlpool of hell, to seek the updraft of heaven, not just to prolong the use of my body or to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. Yes, I want to prolong life to get the maximum mileage I can from this body, in order to learn more things, experience fascinating adventures, do good work for myself and my fellows. But when the time comes to go away from this sphere, I will leave without fear or regret, having done the best I could have done with the gift of life given to me.
I will have no regret upon dying, but joy instead, looking forward to joining my beloved parents and friends who passed on before me. I will be eager to arrive in heaven and be in the company of people who share my feelings and beliefs, congenial souls, those of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, the Buddha, Mohammad, Lao-Tse, Descartes, Bacon, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Whitman, the souls which are brothers of my own. It will be great indeed to be talking to these people, remembering together our lives on earth, discussing the ideas that intrigued us all during our lifetimes and the opinions laid down in our writings and talks.
Yet, what if I am mistaken in hoping for the immortality of my spirit? In that case, my consciousness will dissipate in earth's air upon my death as my body goes still and begins to decompose. There will be no harm done to me or to any one else because I imagined a great existence in an afterlife. In the meantime, I enjoy romancing the soul; and transcendent hope sustains me, filling me with meaning and purpose, moving me to good feelings, deeds, and accomplishments.
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
In his “Meditations,” Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Everything is but what your opinion makes it; and that opinion lies within yourself.”
I hold certain opinions about matter and spirit, which opinions shape my life profitably. I begin by imagining a universe where everything is perfect: all matter in it has taken the form of a tightly ordered crystal, which never changes. Being a a crystal, such a universe would not be subject to the second law of thermodynamics: it would not move towards greater disorder. Energies flow inside the crystal structure in never-ending cycles sustaining the existence of vast numbers of spiritual beings, garnered from living planets everywhere. This is a universe of peace, tranquility, total security, and bliss.
The souls in such a heaven are linked together in a master mind, which sees to all their needs, immaterial as these needs are. Spirits in heaven exist in perfect harmony with each other. Yet, sometimes a soul will pine for living in a material world, with all its vibrant sensations, the risks and thrills of adventure. Then it is sent out to a planet outside the heavenly orb to experience material life once again, and procreate new bodies into which spirits may enter. The connection of the soul to heaven is never lost; after the death of the body, the soul returns to heaven to enrich it with new experiences and bring new growth to the universal mind.
I choose to think I am such a soul. I am not my body, but an imperishable spirit making its home in my body; my body is a possession like my clothes, house, car, discarded when worn out, not useful any more, replaced by a new body, or no material body upon my return to heaven. I can provide no scientific evidence for the existence of the crystal universe of heaven or even for the existence of an immortal soul in me inhabiting my material body; I find it helpful in my life to think and feel it is so. I choose to feel I am always tethered to heaven, no matter what dangers threaten my body. I am like a deep-sea diver or a space-walking astronaut with my lifeline to heaven and companions above. I am a surveyor craft landed on this planet to collect data and sensations, transmitting these to my home in the crystal universe for my fellows there to experience.
I am confronting dangers in my adventures here, yet my soul is always safe from harm; if my body is destroyed, or when it dies of old age, God will withdraw my spirit through the umbilical cord connecting me to heaven. I can experience my body aging, suffering injury, disease and damage; if I cannot prevent these ills, I am not concerned. I seek help from above and continue my life on earth as best as I can.
As I pass from moment to moment, I keep in mind that my spirit is priceless, being the immortal and important part of me; but my body, having evolved over billions of years through innumerable struggles and dangers, this body is also very valuable, deserving the best of care to survive long and well in order to serve the goals of my spirit.
Even when walking through the dark valley of death I will not be afraid; my spirit is safe with God. If my body perishes, it will be a small loss compared to the safety of my spirit. Not that my spirit can be lost, but it may be barred from heaven, and go to a different place, a place of oppressive power, anger, and cruelty.
I remember in my daily efforts that my mission on earth is justice, peace, compassion, knowledge, and wisdom; I focus on my mission: to experience many sensations, adventures, learning, arts, actions, helping my own spiritual growth and that of family, friends, and community. To continue doing so, I also want to make my body as strong, healthy, and versatile as it can be for my age and constitution so I can cope with life's mountains and pitfalls.
How do these ideas of mine differ from religious teachings? They differ because I take them as conscious choices, assumptions, or definitions; no one can argue with definitions. The test of a definition is not its truth, because a definition is arbitrary, but the usefulness of a definition in solving a problem. I define spirit, God, and heaven as I choose, because my definitions help me solve the problem of my existence, and continued survival on earth-- posssibly even beyond this earth.
Should I discover that one of my notions is a detriment rather than an aid in my life, I am ready to reject it, replacing it with a more effective notion; so does a physician when a particular medicine does not heal a patient; the physician tries a different prescription which may help, not harm the patient. This approach of mine is also very different from the various religious doctrines, which sometimes do harm, but are not erased from the scriptures by the patriarchs, except rarely. In this respect, my approach to spiritual matters is more scientific rather than religious, evolving when I meet with new facts and experiences, and not becoming petrified.
The commandments to myself are not carved in stone; I prefer to change, adapting to new trials. I visualize my move before taking it, seeing the result in perfection, sensing that I am
guided by a beam of light from above. I become keenly aware of my surroundings, my body and mind acting deliberately to do what is right, what is proper, what brings forth good fruit, and what is beautiful.
Beauty is indeed immortal, such as we find in great works of art. And my spirit is immortal, but can it change as artistic expression changes? Can my soul get better or worse? Yes, it can, just as character changes. The spirit aims towards perfection, which is not possible on earth or any other material planet; yet that goal of perfection is clear to me. I see that goal in what I think, feel, and do. I clearly visualize the perfect moves I need to make in any game I play. When I achieve that perfection occasionally, then I am “in the zone,” as athletes say. I cannot fail in that state of mind, but can only do what is right and successful.
Otherwise, what happens if my spirit changes for the worse? Can it go back to heaven? I think admission back to heaven would be barred; heaven cannot allow an infected spirit to come back. That sick spirit needs to go through lives of purification, penance, and cleansing on other planets, before being re-admitted to the crystal orb of perfection. Sometimes a soul goes so far astray, it cannot hope to enter heaven any more and is sucked into a sphere of evil, known as hell, a place of grief, agony, and slavery.
My main effort in life is to avoid the whirlpool of hell, to seek the updraft of heaven, not just to prolong the use of my body or to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. Yes, I want to prolong life to get the maximum mileage I can from this body, in order to learn more things, experience fascinating adventures, do good work for myself and my fellows. But when the time comes to go away from this sphere, I will leave without fear or regret, having done the best I could have done with the gift of life given to me.
I will have no regret upon dying, but joy instead, looking forward to joining my beloved parents and friends who passed on before me. I will be eager to arrive in heaven and be in the company of people who share my feelings and beliefs, congenial souls, those of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus, the Buddha, Mohammad, Lao-Tse, Descartes, Bacon, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Whitman, the souls which are brothers of my own. It will be great indeed to be talking to these people, remembering together our lives on earth, discussing the ideas that intrigued us all during our lifetimes and the opinions laid down in our writings and talks.
Yet, what if I am mistaken in hoping for the immortality of my spirit? In that case, my consciousness will dissipate in earth's air upon my death as my body goes still and begins to decompose. There will be no harm done to me or to any one else because I imagined a great existence in an afterlife. In the meantime, I enjoy romancing the soul; and transcendent hope sustains me, filling me with meaning and purpose, moving me to good feelings, deeds, and accomplishments.
The Magic of Light Eating
The Magic of Light Eating
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
Do you remember when you were a kid and had to share a piece of pie or cake with a brother or sister? You each looked carefully to the cutting of the sweet to make sure you were not short changed. In a world which in the past was short of food, getting a fair share of it, or more, became instinctive. Whoever ate more was more likely to survive the next famine. Today, in wealthy societies, we have the opposite situation. We have a superabundance of food which has brought us an epidemic of obesity. You will live a longer, peppier, and healthier life with less food: less food means more life; light eating is magical indeed.
Biologists have known for many decades that animals have longer and healthier life spans when the calories they consume are restricted. Recently, we have found some evidence from genetics to explain how this happens. A period of light eating activates (triggers) a gene, SIRT1, which performs the magic when scientists deprive laboratory animals from eating all the food they normally eat from what is laid out for them. The procedure is called calorie restriction (CR) or calorie deprivation (CD) in biology. I call it calorie control (CC), light eating for you and me and our families.
You may ask, what about nutrition? In the experiments, biologists supply the full nutritional needs of the animals. But they found out that they can still reduce calories by 30%. Initially the animals lose weight, but after a time, weight loss stops, and the animals remain lean, vigorous, and very healthy, to a very advanced age. Mice, and all other species of animals to which the procedure is applied, maintain a normal weight when allowed to eat as much as they want, as opposed to humans who often overeat compulsively, getting fat. Once well fed, animals tend to other needs, such as reproduction.
Reproduction takes precedence over longevity when the food supply is plentiful. When food is in short supply, that’s when the SIRT1 gets to work: animals do better when they live longer to get past the scarcity to the next plenty for their offspring to eat. Then again, the SIRT1 gene is de-activated during times of plenty.
In the case of mice or rats with diabetes induced by experimenters, the disease is reversed with caloric restriction. The gene for diabetes is de-activated, after SIRT1 has been activated.
Incidentally, resveratrol, a polyphenol in red grapes and other plants, brings some of the benefits to health of SIRT1 activation. Plants produce this phytoalexin to counter infections from bacteria and fungi. Associated with the French paradox of health, resveratrol fights cancer, viruses, inflammation, and extends life, if taken in large quantities. A small company in Massachusetts, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, is working to synthesize a compound stronger by far than resveratrol to bring us these benefits without calorie restriction. This medicine is in the early stages of development and may not pan out. In the meantime, we have the option of light eating.
What can we make of this magic of light eating in our lives as humans? We don’t know that we can extend our lives with SIRT1 activation, because experiments with humans are in the initial stages. A pioneer in CR, Dr. Ray L. Walford of UCLA, applied the procedure to himself with the objective of living to 120, but he did not live much beyond a normal human life span, dying two months short of 80. We have, however, much evidence that CR promotes healthier, longer, and more vigorous lives in us humans--provided we get the nutrients we need for growth, tissue repair, and energy.
Specifically, if you maintain a normal weight with 2,000 calories a day, using light eating you cut the calories down to 1,400. You will lose weight and fat for a while. Normal weight according to the charts is probably not the healthiest. Normal is average, and the average weight in the U.S. is too high. Check your body fat percentage: that should be about 15% if you are a man or about 17% if you are a woman. If you continue to lose fat getting much below 15% or 17%, increase your calories to maintain the right body fat percentage for you.
Mind, I am not advising here a strict diet to drop 20 or 60 pounds, look and feel great for a while, then resume your customary eating, regaining the weight just as quickly. The longevity gene is activated to render its health benefits to you after you have restricted calories for a long time. The gene will quickly get de-activated with a little overeating. To benefit fully from the magic of light eating, you commit to it for the balance of your life, every day. To do this, you look at food, not as a source of pleasure so much, but as a source of healthful nutrients. It has been said: “Eat to live, don’t live to eat.” I say, “Get your nutrients first, please your palate second.” Yes, you want to enjoy thoroughly what you choose to eat for health. Thus you avoid feelings of deprivation which lead to eating fattening foods. When you enjoy delicious food leisurely, you digest it better too.
But how do you get enough nutrition from 1,400 calories a day? Ah, there’s the rub: you must eat foods high in nutrition and low in calories. Pack your 1,400 calories with good stuff only. Don’t eat refined grain flours in pasta, breads, or other products; eliminate sugary snacks, fats such as butter, shortening, nuts, avocados, white rice and potatoes, or just have an insignificant amount of such foods for taste. On the positive side, after maturity humans require very little in nutrients. Protein is very important, but 3-4 ounces of protein a day from all sources is sufficient for tissue repair. You need some good fat, unsaturated or mono-saturated with omega-3s and omega-6s, but only two or three tablespoons of fat a day. So far you have used up about 600 calories. The rest can be complex carbohydrates from vegetables and fruits, giving you fiber, vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals with antioxidants. You can also take non-caloric supplements for any other nutrients your doctor recommends.
You may object: “But I would be very hungry with 1,400 calories only.” I say to you, it’s okay. Get good and hungry for your next meal; you will enjoy it more. Your best chance of a great meal next time is to limit your present meal. Hunger will enhance your smell and taste. Choose to eat the most exquisite foods in small amounts. You can afford these foods since you will eat so little. Relish every precious morsel of delicious food, eating slowly. Lay your fork or spoon down for a minute between bites and chew well until each savory morsel flows down your throat. We are not wolves to be bolting down our food. Most people don’t pay enough attention to their food. Concentrate, meditate, with full awareness on what you are eating; try not to think about anything except your food. Certainly don’t walk television, or read while eating. Don’t talk until after you have swallowed; that’s also polite. Music can also be distracting, although you may listen to fine music to relax before the meal or afterwards. When you are no longer hungry, stop eating and begin digesting your small meal. I repeat: this is the way to prepare for the best enjoyment of your next meal, by having fully digested what you ate before, by getting quite hungry again.
When hungry we tend to eat faster; get used to slowing down instead, allowing twenty minutes to elapse until your blood sugar has moved up and hunger subsides. Have you noticed how quickly people eat in our busy society? Fast food is not only served fast to us; we tend to eat it fast also. Put a platter of food on the table with several people to share. Notice how quickly it disappears. That’s instinctive in us. We want our share before someone else takes it. Let others serve themselves and take a little of what’s left. You will not starve, I assure you.
Before you eat something, estimate the calories on your plate and get a subtotal for the day. You have a budget of 1,400 calories, which you must not exceed. Does that seem hard to do? At first estimating calories is a daunting task, yes, but you will get used to a quick estimate in each portion of food with constant practice. Initially, a food scale, recipe cups, and calorie reference book will help. I recommend The Calorie King Fat and Carbohydrate Counter. If you are having difficulty keeping track of calories, eat prepared meals until you get used to portion sizes of the right foods. Eating off an 8-inch plate with a small fork or spoon will also help.
To limit calories each day, try meal replacement for dinner with a protein-juice-psyllium drink or a commercial product; if you are dining out replace your lunch with a protein drink.
If you find you get too hungry between meals on light eating, and are tempted to gobble up something like a small candy bar (240 calories) or a doughnut (350 calories), then snack on something low in calories and high in fiber. A snack on a carrot, cucumber, celery, jicama, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, or other raw vegetable will serve you well. A protein drink with psyllium fiber or oat bran also works wonders in suppressing excessive hunger. Four or five nuts, if you can limit yourself to that many will cut down between-meal hunger too. Eventually you will get used to light meals. As my sister likes to say, your stomach gets smaller. Or, your eye gets smaller than your stomach.
People in wealthy nations have big stomachs, eating far too much, overindulging in their appetite for a huge variety of high-calorie foods, especially animal products. Most of the food goes to waste, not even turning into fertilizer like the Chinese “night soil.” Our bodies are constantly burdened with digesting too much, making us sluggish and sleepy and we constantly slosh down caffeine drinks to stay awake at work or play. You will be far more alert and energetic on light eating, without stimulants.
With light eating, you will experience the magic of weight loss without diets, pills, or liposuction. To lose and maintain the right weight, keep in mind that about three quarters of the calories we take in are burned up just to maintain body functions; exercise uses the balance of the calories that we put to good use. (Walking all day just drinking water will burn one pound of body fat.) The rest of your food is excreted or stashed into fat tissues for the next famine.
If you don’t expect a famine next winter, but want to get rid of excess fat, light eating is the answer for you--with the aid of some daily exercise. Don’t expect too much from exercise, because you need to burn about 3,500 calories to get rid of one pound of body fat. Walking uses about 300 calories an hour. Wrestling, running, or vigorous sex is more effective at 600 calories an hour--50 calories in 5 minutes. But how many of us have the time or stamina to exercise for hours every day? Of course, you can bulk up lifting weights for several hours a day; bulging muscles will burn more calories while you are exercising, or at rest, even asleep. Can you spare the time and motivation for such exertions?
Alternately, you may want to try fasting one day each week. Fasting works magic in many ways as part of a light eating habit. In addition to fat loss, fasting promotes the elimination of toxins throughout your body and gives your digestive system some rest. Don’t fast then gorge; that’s worse than not fasting at all. It’s as bad as skipping meals, especially breakfast or lunch, which some people practice. Gorging then fasting is bad too—similar to gorging then throwing up. I know many people who fast for good health with no ill effects. I usually fast on Sunday, breaking the fast with psyllium, protein power, and juice blended in spring water whenever I get hungry or thirsty. I don’t work on Sunday, taking time to meditate and relax, exercising lightly with yoga. On Monday, I take care to get back to light eating again, not overindulging in food because I fasted.
On light eating, you will find you are less hungry between meals if you eat highly nutritious foods: sprouts, mushrooms, egg whites, chicken breast, fish, and fresh low-starch vegetables, low-calorie high-fiber spinach, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, mustard greens, collard greens, beet greens--are all great for light eating, delicious with some lemon juice, olive oil, a little sea salt. Steaming or quick poaching preserves the colors, flavors, and nutrients of vegetables; it’s my favorite cooking method, if I cook my vegetables at all.
Raw foods are good for you, organic and thoroughly cleaned, but skins on. Eat organic fruits and vegetables with skins, cores, and seeds, if they are very fresh. The best way to get them really fresh is off a tree or vine, ripened to perfection. For such you need a garden; otherwise, go to a farmers market, or select the best, freshest stuff you can spot at the supermarket, usually buried underneath all the stale things, as my mother taught me.
Shopping for food brings me to the matter of savings. You are going to save a ton of money at the grocery store when you are on light eating. Vegetables, grains, and legumes cost far less as a rule than meats and processed foods, especially the small quantities you will be buying. With light eating, you will discover most restaurants serve awfully bad stuff for you and you will eat at home, saving even more money. If money is not a problem for you, think of the food saved for the poor that you will not be putting in your body as ugly, unhealthy fat.
The poor may not be a concern for you, but animals and other living things may be. Light eating implies consumption of fewer animal products, which are high in calories compared to vegetables. Vegetables are living things too; some people believe plants have feelings too, hurting when we cut them down. In our current state of food production we need to cut things down in order to survive, but at least let’s do as little damage as possible with our light eating of leaves, seeds, and fruits.
You may also want to grow your own sprouts for freshness, good quality, and additional savings. I have found sprouts in stores to be of poor quality, often stale, so I grow my own. Fresh sprouts add much to the magic of light eating. They are packed with proteins, vitamins, and minerals, and are low in calories, because fat and carbohydrate content goes down with sprouting. Eat two parts grain sprouts to one part bean sprouts to get complete proteins. You can easily grow sprouts in jars from unprocessed seeds. Rinse seeds daily and drain well. Cover the jar opening with cloth or tissue, so your sprouts are able to breathe. When the seeds have sprouted, put them in your refrigerator, but rinse and drain daily to maintain freshness for up to a week.
With fresh sprouts and other living foods, your body will grow into a lean, dynamic machine very soon. You will be amazed at the energy you will be able to generate. You will love floating on your feet like walking on the moon, never huffing or puffing climbing stairs, gliding up with ease. You will enjoy your curves or angles; so will those that look at you: friends, relatives, and strangers, complimenting you and congratulating you. And what will you have to pay for all this? You will pay less money than before your light eating, enjoying fine dining, exercising only a little self discipline, and rejecting gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins.
March, 2008, Vista, California
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
Do you remember when you were a kid and had to share a piece of pie or cake with a brother or sister? You each looked carefully to the cutting of the sweet to make sure you were not short changed. In a world which in the past was short of food, getting a fair share of it, or more, became instinctive. Whoever ate more was more likely to survive the next famine. Today, in wealthy societies, we have the opposite situation. We have a superabundance of food which has brought us an epidemic of obesity. You will live a longer, peppier, and healthier life with less food: less food means more life; light eating is magical indeed.
Biologists have known for many decades that animals have longer and healthier life spans when the calories they consume are restricted. Recently, we have found some evidence from genetics to explain how this happens. A period of light eating activates (triggers) a gene, SIRT1, which performs the magic when scientists deprive laboratory animals from eating all the food they normally eat from what is laid out for them. The procedure is called calorie restriction (CR) or calorie deprivation (CD) in biology. I call it calorie control (CC), light eating for you and me and our families.
You may ask, what about nutrition? In the experiments, biologists supply the full nutritional needs of the animals. But they found out that they can still reduce calories by 30%. Initially the animals lose weight, but after a time, weight loss stops, and the animals remain lean, vigorous, and very healthy, to a very advanced age. Mice, and all other species of animals to which the procedure is applied, maintain a normal weight when allowed to eat as much as they want, as opposed to humans who often overeat compulsively, getting fat. Once well fed, animals tend to other needs, such as reproduction.
Reproduction takes precedence over longevity when the food supply is plentiful. When food is in short supply, that’s when the SIRT1 gets to work: animals do better when they live longer to get past the scarcity to the next plenty for their offspring to eat. Then again, the SIRT1 gene is de-activated during times of plenty.
In the case of mice or rats with diabetes induced by experimenters, the disease is reversed with caloric restriction. The gene for diabetes is de-activated, after SIRT1 has been activated.
Incidentally, resveratrol, a polyphenol in red grapes and other plants, brings some of the benefits to health of SIRT1 activation. Plants produce this phytoalexin to counter infections from bacteria and fungi. Associated with the French paradox of health, resveratrol fights cancer, viruses, inflammation, and extends life, if taken in large quantities. A small company in Massachusetts, Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, is working to synthesize a compound stronger by far than resveratrol to bring us these benefits without calorie restriction. This medicine is in the early stages of development and may not pan out. In the meantime, we have the option of light eating.
What can we make of this magic of light eating in our lives as humans? We don’t know that we can extend our lives with SIRT1 activation, because experiments with humans are in the initial stages. A pioneer in CR, Dr. Ray L. Walford of UCLA, applied the procedure to himself with the objective of living to 120, but he did not live much beyond a normal human life span, dying two months short of 80. We have, however, much evidence that CR promotes healthier, longer, and more vigorous lives in us humans--provided we get the nutrients we need for growth, tissue repair, and energy.
Specifically, if you maintain a normal weight with 2,000 calories a day, using light eating you cut the calories down to 1,400. You will lose weight and fat for a while. Normal weight according to the charts is probably not the healthiest. Normal is average, and the average weight in the U.S. is too high. Check your body fat percentage: that should be about 15% if you are a man or about 17% if you are a woman. If you continue to lose fat getting much below 15% or 17%, increase your calories to maintain the right body fat percentage for you.
Mind, I am not advising here a strict diet to drop 20 or 60 pounds, look and feel great for a while, then resume your customary eating, regaining the weight just as quickly. The longevity gene is activated to render its health benefits to you after you have restricted calories for a long time. The gene will quickly get de-activated with a little overeating. To benefit fully from the magic of light eating, you commit to it for the balance of your life, every day. To do this, you look at food, not as a source of pleasure so much, but as a source of healthful nutrients. It has been said: “Eat to live, don’t live to eat.” I say, “Get your nutrients first, please your palate second.” Yes, you want to enjoy thoroughly what you choose to eat for health. Thus you avoid feelings of deprivation which lead to eating fattening foods. When you enjoy delicious food leisurely, you digest it better too.
But how do you get enough nutrition from 1,400 calories a day? Ah, there’s the rub: you must eat foods high in nutrition and low in calories. Pack your 1,400 calories with good stuff only. Don’t eat refined grain flours in pasta, breads, or other products; eliminate sugary snacks, fats such as butter, shortening, nuts, avocados, white rice and potatoes, or just have an insignificant amount of such foods for taste. On the positive side, after maturity humans require very little in nutrients. Protein is very important, but 3-4 ounces of protein a day from all sources is sufficient for tissue repair. You need some good fat, unsaturated or mono-saturated with omega-3s and omega-6s, but only two or three tablespoons of fat a day. So far you have used up about 600 calories. The rest can be complex carbohydrates from vegetables and fruits, giving you fiber, vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals with antioxidants. You can also take non-caloric supplements for any other nutrients your doctor recommends.
You may object: “But I would be very hungry with 1,400 calories only.” I say to you, it’s okay. Get good and hungry for your next meal; you will enjoy it more. Your best chance of a great meal next time is to limit your present meal. Hunger will enhance your smell and taste. Choose to eat the most exquisite foods in small amounts. You can afford these foods since you will eat so little. Relish every precious morsel of delicious food, eating slowly. Lay your fork or spoon down for a minute between bites and chew well until each savory morsel flows down your throat. We are not wolves to be bolting down our food. Most people don’t pay enough attention to their food. Concentrate, meditate, with full awareness on what you are eating; try not to think about anything except your food. Certainly don’t walk television, or read while eating. Don’t talk until after you have swallowed; that’s also polite. Music can also be distracting, although you may listen to fine music to relax before the meal or afterwards. When you are no longer hungry, stop eating and begin digesting your small meal. I repeat: this is the way to prepare for the best enjoyment of your next meal, by having fully digested what you ate before, by getting quite hungry again.
When hungry we tend to eat faster; get used to slowing down instead, allowing twenty minutes to elapse until your blood sugar has moved up and hunger subsides. Have you noticed how quickly people eat in our busy society? Fast food is not only served fast to us; we tend to eat it fast also. Put a platter of food on the table with several people to share. Notice how quickly it disappears. That’s instinctive in us. We want our share before someone else takes it. Let others serve themselves and take a little of what’s left. You will not starve, I assure you.
Before you eat something, estimate the calories on your plate and get a subtotal for the day. You have a budget of 1,400 calories, which you must not exceed. Does that seem hard to do? At first estimating calories is a daunting task, yes, but you will get used to a quick estimate in each portion of food with constant practice. Initially, a food scale, recipe cups, and calorie reference book will help. I recommend The Calorie King Fat and Carbohydrate Counter. If you are having difficulty keeping track of calories, eat prepared meals until you get used to portion sizes of the right foods. Eating off an 8-inch plate with a small fork or spoon will also help.
To limit calories each day, try meal replacement for dinner with a protein-juice-psyllium drink or a commercial product; if you are dining out replace your lunch with a protein drink.
If you find you get too hungry between meals on light eating, and are tempted to gobble up something like a small candy bar (240 calories) or a doughnut (350 calories), then snack on something low in calories and high in fiber. A snack on a carrot, cucumber, celery, jicama, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, or other raw vegetable will serve you well. A protein drink with psyllium fiber or oat bran also works wonders in suppressing excessive hunger. Four or five nuts, if you can limit yourself to that many will cut down between-meal hunger too. Eventually you will get used to light meals. As my sister likes to say, your stomach gets smaller. Or, your eye gets smaller than your stomach.
People in wealthy nations have big stomachs, eating far too much, overindulging in their appetite for a huge variety of high-calorie foods, especially animal products. Most of the food goes to waste, not even turning into fertilizer like the Chinese “night soil.” Our bodies are constantly burdened with digesting too much, making us sluggish and sleepy and we constantly slosh down caffeine drinks to stay awake at work or play. You will be far more alert and energetic on light eating, without stimulants.
With light eating, you will experience the magic of weight loss without diets, pills, or liposuction. To lose and maintain the right weight, keep in mind that about three quarters of the calories we take in are burned up just to maintain body functions; exercise uses the balance of the calories that we put to good use. (Walking all day just drinking water will burn one pound of body fat.) The rest of your food is excreted or stashed into fat tissues for the next famine.
If you don’t expect a famine next winter, but want to get rid of excess fat, light eating is the answer for you--with the aid of some daily exercise. Don’t expect too much from exercise, because you need to burn about 3,500 calories to get rid of one pound of body fat. Walking uses about 300 calories an hour. Wrestling, running, or vigorous sex is more effective at 600 calories an hour--50 calories in 5 minutes. But how many of us have the time or stamina to exercise for hours every day? Of course, you can bulk up lifting weights for several hours a day; bulging muscles will burn more calories while you are exercising, or at rest, even asleep. Can you spare the time and motivation for such exertions?
Alternately, you may want to try fasting one day each week. Fasting works magic in many ways as part of a light eating habit. In addition to fat loss, fasting promotes the elimination of toxins throughout your body and gives your digestive system some rest. Don’t fast then gorge; that’s worse than not fasting at all. It’s as bad as skipping meals, especially breakfast or lunch, which some people practice. Gorging then fasting is bad too—similar to gorging then throwing up. I know many people who fast for good health with no ill effects. I usually fast on Sunday, breaking the fast with psyllium, protein power, and juice blended in spring water whenever I get hungry or thirsty. I don’t work on Sunday, taking time to meditate and relax, exercising lightly with yoga. On Monday, I take care to get back to light eating again, not overindulging in food because I fasted.
On light eating, you will find you are less hungry between meals if you eat highly nutritious foods: sprouts, mushrooms, egg whites, chicken breast, fish, and fresh low-starch vegetables, low-calorie high-fiber spinach, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, mustard greens, collard greens, beet greens--are all great for light eating, delicious with some lemon juice, olive oil, a little sea salt. Steaming or quick poaching preserves the colors, flavors, and nutrients of vegetables; it’s my favorite cooking method, if I cook my vegetables at all.
Raw foods are good for you, organic and thoroughly cleaned, but skins on. Eat organic fruits and vegetables with skins, cores, and seeds, if they are very fresh. The best way to get them really fresh is off a tree or vine, ripened to perfection. For such you need a garden; otherwise, go to a farmers market, or select the best, freshest stuff you can spot at the supermarket, usually buried underneath all the stale things, as my mother taught me.
Shopping for food brings me to the matter of savings. You are going to save a ton of money at the grocery store when you are on light eating. Vegetables, grains, and legumes cost far less as a rule than meats and processed foods, especially the small quantities you will be buying. With light eating, you will discover most restaurants serve awfully bad stuff for you and you will eat at home, saving even more money. If money is not a problem for you, think of the food saved for the poor that you will not be putting in your body as ugly, unhealthy fat.
The poor may not be a concern for you, but animals and other living things may be. Light eating implies consumption of fewer animal products, which are high in calories compared to vegetables. Vegetables are living things too; some people believe plants have feelings too, hurting when we cut them down. In our current state of food production we need to cut things down in order to survive, but at least let’s do as little damage as possible with our light eating of leaves, seeds, and fruits.
You may also want to grow your own sprouts for freshness, good quality, and additional savings. I have found sprouts in stores to be of poor quality, often stale, so I grow my own. Fresh sprouts add much to the magic of light eating. They are packed with proteins, vitamins, and minerals, and are low in calories, because fat and carbohydrate content goes down with sprouting. Eat two parts grain sprouts to one part bean sprouts to get complete proteins. You can easily grow sprouts in jars from unprocessed seeds. Rinse seeds daily and drain well. Cover the jar opening with cloth or tissue, so your sprouts are able to breathe. When the seeds have sprouted, put them in your refrigerator, but rinse and drain daily to maintain freshness for up to a week.
With fresh sprouts and other living foods, your body will grow into a lean, dynamic machine very soon. You will be amazed at the energy you will be able to generate. You will love floating on your feet like walking on the moon, never huffing or puffing climbing stairs, gliding up with ease. You will enjoy your curves or angles; so will those that look at you: friends, relatives, and strangers, complimenting you and congratulating you. And what will you have to pay for all this? You will pay less money than before your light eating, enjoying fine dining, exercising only a little self discipline, and rejecting gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins.
March, 2008, Vista, California
Sex and the Senior
Sex and the Senior
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
(1406 Words)
The television series "Sex and the City" depicts the lives of New York women in their late thirties and early forties, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, a woman of considerable sex appeal of the sophisticated type. The film of the same name and the series have met with substantial critical and box office success. It is time for script writers and film makers now to produce "Sex and the Senior." I don't mean anything like "Dirty Old Men," where the sexual proclivities of the old are held up for ridicule and laughter, but more like "Terms of Endearment," a realistic treatment of the conflicts between men and women in middle and old age, funny conflicts, also tragic. Surely romantic love and sex are primarily for the young, Tristan and Isolde pairs, who usually marry after a few years of fooling around, producing the next generation; but today gray pride allows for older people the need and the right to enjoy love and sex, if they are up to it, for simple recreation; or, as in love birds, to foster affection and cooperation for couples in their roles demanded by family and society, to whatever extent they are able to perform these roles; for example, as grandparents, or new parents, if the woman is young enough and the man still potent.
Impecunious but ambitious younger women often marry older men who are famous or wealthy; such a marriage takes care of her needs and luxuries, her children are looked after properly, the old husband is less likely to stray, leaving her to survive on welfare; also, if he dies before she does, a likely event, she will be wealthy herself to have her choice among younger men for a new husband. Thus rich old men not infrequently continue to have children. My own grandfather on my mother's side married for the third time in his seventies a widow in her forties with children. She got pregnant but the children shamed them in aborting the child. Bing Crosby raised a second family with Kathryn. "The Odd Couple" star Tony Randall married a woman in her twenties; he was in his seventies and had two children, who sadly became orphans, but wealthy ones. Billionaire Rupert Murdock of News Corporation is raising a second family, while his older sons are taking over the reins of his empire.
Today seniors are not criticized as much for wanting love and sex, even marriage and children; we're in a liberation movement. The problem for seniors is not public criticism but private inclination. Often, due to age or illness, older people simply do not care for sex. Erections for the men are not that important in an relationship, in spite of the advertising for Viagra and Cialis. Even without an erection a man can satisfy a receptive woman if he desires to do so; consider how lesbians make love to each other. He may not have the libido to care enough to do it, or his partner may not be attractive enough to excite him.
As we age we become less attractive, even with cosmetics, liposuction, diet and exercise. Some old people, full of wrinkles, are beautiful when they display a unique character etched on their bodies, like gnarled olive trees which have born fruit for hundreds of years. That is not the sort of beauty that stimulates sexual passion. A man's libido is not raised by such beauty so he can perform in bed as men are expected to perform.
For older women the problem of finding a willing sexual partner is more difficult; men die younger so fewer of them are available in their age group for sex, and even fewer who care to engage in it or are able to do it. In recent years some women go to poor African or Asian countries for sex with younger men who are willing to love them for money. For men, commercial sex has been around for a long time in poor countries or rich ones; sex workers are available to take care of your sexual needs, if you have any and if you want that kind of quick entertainment.
A more lasting partnership may emerge between an old wealthy person and a young one who needs financial support to get educated or simply to get ahead and survive. It's not exactly prostitution if they like each other and both realize it's a temporary relationship until the young person has advanced or the old person has died or lost interest in sex. When my dad was in his sixties and separated from my mother, he was approached by poor young women who wanted that kind of relationship, but he declined; he thought such activity was undignified and dangerous. He liked to point out to old friends who got involved with young women, losing their money, health, and even their lives prematurely. A few years later, while walking in Hollywood streets for exercise, women would stop him and ask him if he wanted a date. He declined again but was puzzled that such women would offer their services to an old, obviously respectable man. Now my mother started wearing a black dress and shawl when she turned fifty; even then she was very charming and vivacious, and when living alone, she got offers from older men for sex or marriage until she became too old and decrepit. She always declined these propositions, but she liked to brag about them.
Clearly my dad and mom were biased against senior sex, even for themselves, where most people turn a blind eye. Such a bias was prevalent in their time but is now fading. We have a way to go before this bias disappears, as we do with race prejudice; we'll get there eventually as people realize old people are just old, not dead to the world while their bodies are still alive.
What is not fitting or proper is for old women to dress up and behave like chicks, or old men with wigs and pork bellies to strut around like young bucks. Being honest and acting your age is proper, without limiting yourself in behavior as long as you are decent and fair to others. Your partner, as old as you are or younger, should benefit from the relationship. You should promote the life of your young partners and be prepared to let go of them when they are ready to fly on their own or to other lovers. Engage in safe sex as much as you want without shame for your age; don't let your children, relatives, or friends make you feel you are doing something wrong just because you are old.
Old or not, most of us need sex for happiness and health as long as it is safe. Sexuality goes back billions of years in our ancestors, plants first, then animals, a basic tool of evolution, mixing genes to produce new varieties of beings. Sex in plants is seen in their flowering to attract insects for pollination; in animals, displays with color and sound are often used to attract a partner for reproduction: the female becomes receptive during heat, the male courts her and mounts, ejaculates quickly--for most species coupling is all over in a minute or two. Different behavior is seen in animals that mate for life, such as penguins and other birds, when both parents are needed for the successful rearing and survival of the offspring--and in humans for similar reasons. Couples continue to court each other, kissing and fondling. Parents stay together for the sake of the children. Some couples stay together for the sake of the grandchildren, also a good reason. My parents eventually got together again for the sake of their family and lived unhappily with each other until their ends in their nineties.
Other human couples stay together because they like each other as partners in life, loving each other till the end, or remain wedded because of habit, fear of being alone, lack of adventurous spirit, many reasons. Most such arrangements usually do not involve any sexual activity. One day one partner dies, or walks away, and an old person is left alone to fend for happiness. That person may desire sex still and seek it, but cannot find it in decent contacts--a difficult challenge.
What can we advise such a person? Reach out and touch someone if you like or love them; it's worth the trouble and the risk; it's part of the challenge of staying alive--and living--as we age.
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
(1406 Words)
The television series "Sex and the City" depicts the lives of New York women in their late thirties and early forties, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, a woman of considerable sex appeal of the sophisticated type. The film of the same name and the series have met with substantial critical and box office success. It is time for script writers and film makers now to produce "Sex and the Senior." I don't mean anything like "Dirty Old Men," where the sexual proclivities of the old are held up for ridicule and laughter, but more like "Terms of Endearment," a realistic treatment of the conflicts between men and women in middle and old age, funny conflicts, also tragic. Surely romantic love and sex are primarily for the young, Tristan and Isolde pairs, who usually marry after a few years of fooling around, producing the next generation; but today gray pride allows for older people the need and the right to enjoy love and sex, if they are up to it, for simple recreation; or, as in love birds, to foster affection and cooperation for couples in their roles demanded by family and society, to whatever extent they are able to perform these roles; for example, as grandparents, or new parents, if the woman is young enough and the man still potent.
Impecunious but ambitious younger women often marry older men who are famous or wealthy; such a marriage takes care of her needs and luxuries, her children are looked after properly, the old husband is less likely to stray, leaving her to survive on welfare; also, if he dies before she does, a likely event, she will be wealthy herself to have her choice among younger men for a new husband. Thus rich old men not infrequently continue to have children. My own grandfather on my mother's side married for the third time in his seventies a widow in her forties with children. She got pregnant but the children shamed them in aborting the child. Bing Crosby raised a second family with Kathryn. "The Odd Couple" star Tony Randall married a woman in her twenties; he was in his seventies and had two children, who sadly became orphans, but wealthy ones. Billionaire Rupert Murdock of News Corporation is raising a second family, while his older sons are taking over the reins of his empire.
Today seniors are not criticized as much for wanting love and sex, even marriage and children; we're in a liberation movement. The problem for seniors is not public criticism but private inclination. Often, due to age or illness, older people simply do not care for sex. Erections for the men are not that important in an relationship, in spite of the advertising for Viagra and Cialis. Even without an erection a man can satisfy a receptive woman if he desires to do so; consider how lesbians make love to each other. He may not have the libido to care enough to do it, or his partner may not be attractive enough to excite him.
As we age we become less attractive, even with cosmetics, liposuction, diet and exercise. Some old people, full of wrinkles, are beautiful when they display a unique character etched on their bodies, like gnarled olive trees which have born fruit for hundreds of years. That is not the sort of beauty that stimulates sexual passion. A man's libido is not raised by such beauty so he can perform in bed as men are expected to perform.
For older women the problem of finding a willing sexual partner is more difficult; men die younger so fewer of them are available in their age group for sex, and even fewer who care to engage in it or are able to do it. In recent years some women go to poor African or Asian countries for sex with younger men who are willing to love them for money. For men, commercial sex has been around for a long time in poor countries or rich ones; sex workers are available to take care of your sexual needs, if you have any and if you want that kind of quick entertainment.
A more lasting partnership may emerge between an old wealthy person and a young one who needs financial support to get educated or simply to get ahead and survive. It's not exactly prostitution if they like each other and both realize it's a temporary relationship until the young person has advanced or the old person has died or lost interest in sex. When my dad was in his sixties and separated from my mother, he was approached by poor young women who wanted that kind of relationship, but he declined; he thought such activity was undignified and dangerous. He liked to point out to old friends who got involved with young women, losing their money, health, and even their lives prematurely. A few years later, while walking in Hollywood streets for exercise, women would stop him and ask him if he wanted a date. He declined again but was puzzled that such women would offer their services to an old, obviously respectable man. Now my mother started wearing a black dress and shawl when she turned fifty; even then she was very charming and vivacious, and when living alone, she got offers from older men for sex or marriage until she became too old and decrepit. She always declined these propositions, but she liked to brag about them.
Clearly my dad and mom were biased against senior sex, even for themselves, where most people turn a blind eye. Such a bias was prevalent in their time but is now fading. We have a way to go before this bias disappears, as we do with race prejudice; we'll get there eventually as people realize old people are just old, not dead to the world while their bodies are still alive.
What is not fitting or proper is for old women to dress up and behave like chicks, or old men with wigs and pork bellies to strut around like young bucks. Being honest and acting your age is proper, without limiting yourself in behavior as long as you are decent and fair to others. Your partner, as old as you are or younger, should benefit from the relationship. You should promote the life of your young partners and be prepared to let go of them when they are ready to fly on their own or to other lovers. Engage in safe sex as much as you want without shame for your age; don't let your children, relatives, or friends make you feel you are doing something wrong just because you are old.
Old or not, most of us need sex for happiness and health as long as it is safe. Sexuality goes back billions of years in our ancestors, plants first, then animals, a basic tool of evolution, mixing genes to produce new varieties of beings. Sex in plants is seen in their flowering to attract insects for pollination; in animals, displays with color and sound are often used to attract a partner for reproduction: the female becomes receptive during heat, the male courts her and mounts, ejaculates quickly--for most species coupling is all over in a minute or two. Different behavior is seen in animals that mate for life, such as penguins and other birds, when both parents are needed for the successful rearing and survival of the offspring--and in humans for similar reasons. Couples continue to court each other, kissing and fondling. Parents stay together for the sake of the children. Some couples stay together for the sake of the grandchildren, also a good reason. My parents eventually got together again for the sake of their family and lived unhappily with each other until their ends in their nineties.
Other human couples stay together because they like each other as partners in life, loving each other till the end, or remain wedded because of habit, fear of being alone, lack of adventurous spirit, many reasons. Most such arrangements usually do not involve any sexual activity. One day one partner dies, or walks away, and an old person is left alone to fend for happiness. That person may desire sex still and seek it, but cannot find it in decent contacts--a difficult challenge.
What can we advise such a person? Reach out and touch someone if you like or love them; it's worth the trouble and the risk; it's part of the challenge of staying alive--and living--as we age.
The Practical Dreamer
On Becoming a Practical Dreamer
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
A dreamer is a person with a fruitful imagination; a dreamer is practical when imagination is combined with action to produce useful products or services, yielding profits. America has been home to many practical dreamers: Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, Walt Disney--the list is endless. Most started life in the United States as poor immigrants or humble locals, seeking to improve their condition, surpassed their dearest dreams. A dreamer enjoys indulging his fantasies without doing anything to realize them; a realist keeps trudging along in life doing what is customary, certain, or conveniently profitable, without achieving anything of great splendor. As partners but separate individuals, dreamer and realist can function productively as well as one individual possessing both qualities. If you are not such a person, find a complimentary partner. Some of the most successful teams in the corporate world are those of the imaginative engineer and the person of business. Many marriages do well also, combining the dreamer and the pragmatist. Most of us are not practical dreamers; otherwise, we would be far more successful; but we all possess a measure of imagination and practicality, which we can enlarge if we follow right thoughts, right purposes, and right behaviors.
Most of what we think is day-dreaming, escaping our limitations and humdrum existence into worlds of unrealistic fantasies, with no chance of actualization. Thoughts are birds in flight; but they can be directed towards a goal, a destination, while retaining some of their winged power. Through the exercise of the will, even in sleep after some years of practice, you can focus your thoughts on a specific subject, and with laser strength penetrate the barrier of your problem. You can view the universe of matter and mind as a complex web of problems, a never-ending series of questions, asking like a child why, why, why. Daddy, why do things fall down? It's gravity, my child. What is gravity? Gravity is a force. What is a force, daddy? Oh shut up, can't you see I'm busy paying bills? That is the end of questioning, the beginning of routine.
Practical dreaming to create new things is the opposite of routine. Direct your thoughts to what is novel, unfamiliar, even surprising, in a strange territory. Expect to discover good things, expect you will solve your problem, expect you will be able survive the wilderness of the imagination to reach civilization. That's self-confidence, the armor for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Abraham Lincoln went through some very disappointing periods leading the Union armies in the Civil War. Despite his melancholy nature, his faith in a united America never wavered. Faith is the springboard of creative work: fervently believing in something gets you going, building, achieving; doubt lays you low in lethargy.
Yeah, but how do I acquire an active faith? I consider the accomplishments I admire, choosing one I am well suited by my nature to emulate. I admire the works of Lord Bertrand Russell; I seek to think, write, and act as he did in his life, because I have similar talents to his, although I may not be as gifted as he was. I do the best I can in my chosen direction. Whom do you admire? Do you have any true affinity for the projects you are to undertake to approach your master? If not, look elsewhere for your proper occupation. But anywhere you look, you cannot be without proper direction.
Thoughts need reins; galloping this way and that they go nowhere. To get somewhere, aim towards a specific goal, a purpose, a project to complete, at a specific point in the future. The future is shaped by our thoughts and goals to be bright, dark, or gray; a right goal helps realize a bright future for ourselves and our community. But your goal cannot be placed too far into the future; if your project is very large, requiring much time to complete, divide it into sub-goals, each one with a completion date. I know that until you get accustomed to goal setting, it will stress you, and make you anxious. Bear up, persist, the stress will lift. If you cannot meet a deadline, don't despair; next time set a reasonable time line. When we are working creatively, independently, our goals are tools, not commands from authority. Imaginative ideas incubate, on occasion requiring a longer or shorter period to hatch.
Most people don't direct their imagination. Listen to a group talking socially or even for business purposes. People talk as they think, in a confused, disorganized, random way. They don't stay with a topic of discussion for long, wondering this way and that, unless they are tightly controlled by debating rules, which often some individuals will defy to rant on and on about their pet grievances. In synergistic groups for creative work, the proctor needs to maintain discipline on members to stay on focus; yet allow enough freedom for exploration into the unknown.
The unknown, the unsolved problem, and the mystery are always unpredictable and our conquest of these cannot be programmed. We can follow, however, some general approaches. Do not get boxed in preconceived or customary ideas. Dare to go outside established boundaries. Do not assume more constraints to the problem than are actually there. Allow your imagination free flight, simply recording any and all ideas that occur without criticizing them or analyzing them at the time of brainstorming. You choose and analyze ideas later, during the critical phase that follows as which ideas are practical and which are nonsense. Sometimes, the most apparently nonsensical, far fetched, ridiculous, outlandish ideas will lead to the most important breakthroughs. Because these ideas seemed unlikely to be of value, they were ignored by other thinkers.
We cannot ignore any possibilities when exploring the unknown; the solution can be hiding anywhere in the problem manifold. Walt Disney and company called this “imagineering.” Disney's business was entertainment, to amuse children and their families. From the first primitive images of Mickey Mouse to his final classic “Mary Poppins,” Disney followed the principles of “imagineering:” engineering fantasies to satisfy his ultimate goal of entertainment, with stupendous financial success.
Before Disney, Thomas Edison mastered the art of “imagineering” with a sixth-grade education. Edison tested thousands of processes and materials to come up with a working light bulb. One of the materials for his bulb filament was a mustache hair; how ridiculous can you get? Finally, a tungsten filament did the job, but it burned too quickly to ashes in spite of the vacuum. The inventor had used the best available equipment to produce vacuum in the bulb. Did he give up? No, he designed his own vacuum pump for a far better vacuum than had existed on earth before. Success and fortune followed, with the formation of the Edison Company for the production and distribution of electric lights, starting with Wall Street of New York.
Edison was a model of well-directed persistence for success. Smart persistence on a task works because it is a rare quality; most people quit early, tired or disheartened. People generally seek instant gratification, fast, fast relief, quick weight loss, free gifts, and lucky big wins. Few are those willing to dig, dig, and dig for the gold. The Mother Lode of gold, the richest in the American West was found a few feet below the surface gold miners originally extracted, after which they quit the mine. Persistence is right behavior for the practical dreamer, poking a problem from one side, then another, and another, until the dreamer finds a weakness in the shell surrounding the problem. Try this method to break a macadamia nut with an ordinary cracker; many times you will succeed. Brute force also works if you don't have a macadamia cracker. Place the nut inside a paper bag and whack it with a hammer. Sometimes, brute force is the right action to put our dreams into profitable practice.
Brute force may be useful on occasion, but as a rule the practical dreamer is gentle and deliberate. The great innovative surgeon works with precision and care in cutting out a tumor, bringing tissues together, and suturing. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt worked with many detailed sketches, studies, details, before putting paint on canvass or wall to create an artistic masterpiece. The astronomer searches the night sky patiently and systematically to locate an unknown celestial body that will bear the searcher's name. We should all try to be like the people weaving the famed oriental rugs with simple tools, never tiring of detail, as if time stands still for us, and eternity is in our every moment.
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
A dreamer is a person with a fruitful imagination; a dreamer is practical when imagination is combined with action to produce useful products or services, yielding profits. America has been home to many practical dreamers: Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, Walt Disney--the list is endless. Most started life in the United States as poor immigrants or humble locals, seeking to improve their condition, surpassed their dearest dreams. A dreamer enjoys indulging his fantasies without doing anything to realize them; a realist keeps trudging along in life doing what is customary, certain, or conveniently profitable, without achieving anything of great splendor. As partners but separate individuals, dreamer and realist can function productively as well as one individual possessing both qualities. If you are not such a person, find a complimentary partner. Some of the most successful teams in the corporate world are those of the imaginative engineer and the person of business. Many marriages do well also, combining the dreamer and the pragmatist. Most of us are not practical dreamers; otherwise, we would be far more successful; but we all possess a measure of imagination and practicality, which we can enlarge if we follow right thoughts, right purposes, and right behaviors.
Most of what we think is day-dreaming, escaping our limitations and humdrum existence into worlds of unrealistic fantasies, with no chance of actualization. Thoughts are birds in flight; but they can be directed towards a goal, a destination, while retaining some of their winged power. Through the exercise of the will, even in sleep after some years of practice, you can focus your thoughts on a specific subject, and with laser strength penetrate the barrier of your problem. You can view the universe of matter and mind as a complex web of problems, a never-ending series of questions, asking like a child why, why, why. Daddy, why do things fall down? It's gravity, my child. What is gravity? Gravity is a force. What is a force, daddy? Oh shut up, can't you see I'm busy paying bills? That is the end of questioning, the beginning of routine.
Practical dreaming to create new things is the opposite of routine. Direct your thoughts to what is novel, unfamiliar, even surprising, in a strange territory. Expect to discover good things, expect you will solve your problem, expect you will be able survive the wilderness of the imagination to reach civilization. That's self-confidence, the armor for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Abraham Lincoln went through some very disappointing periods leading the Union armies in the Civil War. Despite his melancholy nature, his faith in a united America never wavered. Faith is the springboard of creative work: fervently believing in something gets you going, building, achieving; doubt lays you low in lethargy.
Yeah, but how do I acquire an active faith? I consider the accomplishments I admire, choosing one I am well suited by my nature to emulate. I admire the works of Lord Bertrand Russell; I seek to think, write, and act as he did in his life, because I have similar talents to his, although I may not be as gifted as he was. I do the best I can in my chosen direction. Whom do you admire? Do you have any true affinity for the projects you are to undertake to approach your master? If not, look elsewhere for your proper occupation. But anywhere you look, you cannot be without proper direction.
Thoughts need reins; galloping this way and that they go nowhere. To get somewhere, aim towards a specific goal, a purpose, a project to complete, at a specific point in the future. The future is shaped by our thoughts and goals to be bright, dark, or gray; a right goal helps realize a bright future for ourselves and our community. But your goal cannot be placed too far into the future; if your project is very large, requiring much time to complete, divide it into sub-goals, each one with a completion date. I know that until you get accustomed to goal setting, it will stress you, and make you anxious. Bear up, persist, the stress will lift. If you cannot meet a deadline, don't despair; next time set a reasonable time line. When we are working creatively, independently, our goals are tools, not commands from authority. Imaginative ideas incubate, on occasion requiring a longer or shorter period to hatch.
Most people don't direct their imagination. Listen to a group talking socially or even for business purposes. People talk as they think, in a confused, disorganized, random way. They don't stay with a topic of discussion for long, wondering this way and that, unless they are tightly controlled by debating rules, which often some individuals will defy to rant on and on about their pet grievances. In synergistic groups for creative work, the proctor needs to maintain discipline on members to stay on focus; yet allow enough freedom for exploration into the unknown.
The unknown, the unsolved problem, and the mystery are always unpredictable and our conquest of these cannot be programmed. We can follow, however, some general approaches. Do not get boxed in preconceived or customary ideas. Dare to go outside established boundaries. Do not assume more constraints to the problem than are actually there. Allow your imagination free flight, simply recording any and all ideas that occur without criticizing them or analyzing them at the time of brainstorming. You choose and analyze ideas later, during the critical phase that follows as which ideas are practical and which are nonsense. Sometimes, the most apparently nonsensical, far fetched, ridiculous, outlandish ideas will lead to the most important breakthroughs. Because these ideas seemed unlikely to be of value, they were ignored by other thinkers.
We cannot ignore any possibilities when exploring the unknown; the solution can be hiding anywhere in the problem manifold. Walt Disney and company called this “imagineering.” Disney's business was entertainment, to amuse children and their families. From the first primitive images of Mickey Mouse to his final classic “Mary Poppins,” Disney followed the principles of “imagineering:” engineering fantasies to satisfy his ultimate goal of entertainment, with stupendous financial success.
Before Disney, Thomas Edison mastered the art of “imagineering” with a sixth-grade education. Edison tested thousands of processes and materials to come up with a working light bulb. One of the materials for his bulb filament was a mustache hair; how ridiculous can you get? Finally, a tungsten filament did the job, but it burned too quickly to ashes in spite of the vacuum. The inventor had used the best available equipment to produce vacuum in the bulb. Did he give up? No, he designed his own vacuum pump for a far better vacuum than had existed on earth before. Success and fortune followed, with the formation of the Edison Company for the production and distribution of electric lights, starting with Wall Street of New York.
Edison was a model of well-directed persistence for success. Smart persistence on a task works because it is a rare quality; most people quit early, tired or disheartened. People generally seek instant gratification, fast, fast relief, quick weight loss, free gifts, and lucky big wins. Few are those willing to dig, dig, and dig for the gold. The Mother Lode of gold, the richest in the American West was found a few feet below the surface gold miners originally extracted, after which they quit the mine. Persistence is right behavior for the practical dreamer, poking a problem from one side, then another, and another, until the dreamer finds a weakness in the shell surrounding the problem. Try this method to break a macadamia nut with an ordinary cracker; many times you will succeed. Brute force also works if you don't have a macadamia cracker. Place the nut inside a paper bag and whack it with a hammer. Sometimes, brute force is the right action to put our dreams into profitable practice.
Brute force may be useful on occasion, but as a rule the practical dreamer is gentle and deliberate. The great innovative surgeon works with precision and care in cutting out a tumor, bringing tissues together, and suturing. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt worked with many detailed sketches, studies, details, before putting paint on canvass or wall to create an artistic masterpiece. The astronomer searches the night sky patiently and systematically to locate an unknown celestial body that will bear the searcher's name. We should all try to be like the people weaving the famed oriental rugs with simple tools, never tiring of detail, as if time stands still for us, and eternity is in our every moment.
On Using Sunlight to Distill Sea Water
On Using Sunlight to Distill Sea Water
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
From space the Earth is mostly blue water, veiled with white vapor; a few brownish yellow patches are the deserts: Sahara, Arabia, Gobi, Australia's northwest. Seventy percent of Earth's surface is water, oceans deep enough to drown the Himalayas. Yet, fresh water is a precious resource, getting scarcer with growing human populations. The sun boils up much water into clouds, which drift over land, raining down, sometimes in great torrents; but in many land areas, it does not rain enough to sustain life well. For those areas human devices can use sunlight to distill sea water at a minimal cost after installation.
Sunlight is free and and plentiful where we need fresh water most, in deserts and arid areas: Southern California, Baha California, the Sahara, Arabia, and Australia. Seawater is not far from the same areas, except the Gobi. To concentrate sunlight on water for rapid boiling, we need mirrors, lenses, or a combination of both. Semiconductors to produce electricity for our machinery are also needed. Mirrors, lenses, and semiconductors are all made from silica sands, also plentiful in desert areas.
We also need capital and labor to fashion our materials into efficient distillation equipment. Poor, work-hungry local people can supply the labor; the industrialized nations have plenty of excess capital they are eager to invest for profit.
That's reasonable, as my dad would have said, so let's do it. If it's reasonable, my mom, would have countered, it's not practical. Why aren't people doing it?
So what's keeping us from launching enterprises for solar water distillation? It may be that we cannot earn enough profit, or any at all, with the use of available technology. I'd like to generate new ideas for both the technology and the economics; good ideas will make this industry boom eventually, since the fundamentals are right for its development. Again, that's reasonable, if people want to be that way, instead of starting new genocides or wars.
Make ideas, not wars. What's given? The sun rises somewhere in the east and sets somewhere in the west, the exact locations depending on the seasons. Mirrors or lenses have two motions, vertical and horizontal, to follow the sun as it travels in the sky. Our installation is close to the coast with canals or pipes bringing seawater to it. Pipes, rail, or trucks carry the distilled water where it's needed; salty minerals are taken away to plants for further processing. Electric turbines produce power from the steam generated as it is cooled, another valuable byproduct.
Mirror systems focusing sunlight on a boiler already exist in Arabia for the production of electricity with steam turbines. I visualize such a system of mirrors in a semicircle, directing sunlight to three or more lenses, which heat rotating boilers to increasingly higher temperatures. When the last boiler achieves superheated steam, the steam feeds a turbine and the residual very salty water drains to outside drying tanks. The empty boiler fills with sea water. Stopping briefly behind each lens, the boiler gets heated again for steam production. In this system, production of electricity and fresh water is continuous.
With the system installed, energy, fresh water, and salts are produced without polluting the environment; moreover, since sunlight is free, there are no costs other than maintenance. With plenty of fresh water and energy, crops thrive in the sunlit desert. Baha California can become a verdant paradise, and so can many coastal areas in North Africa, the Middle East and Australia. Trees can also be planted which will absorb some of the sun's energy impacting the Earth causing planetary warming.
Forests cool the environment and increase rainfall, pushing back desertification.
We have jumbed ahead in our story; let's look at some of the details of our design. Three or more mirrors opposite each lens reflect sunlight to it right to the edges. The mirrors are parabolic, expressed as y=ax². The parameter “a” is fixed based on the distance from the mirror to the lens, deciding how “open” the parabola is. Any reflected sunlight falling outside the lens is absorbed by semiconductors, which provide negative feedback to correct the position of the mirrors.
Although the three mirrors are oriented somewhat differently, because they have different positions, their deviations are fixed, so the servo mechanism on the lens can control them together. The mirrors do follow the sun's movement in the sky, but the servo controls are still needed for perfect focusing of the reflected sunlight. The lens focuses sunlight on the surface of the water in the boiler. This is accomplished because the boiler is tilted upwards towards the lens.
The mirrors of our system are not the kind you have in your bathroom; they are crafted from glass and highly polished stainless steel backing which can stand up to the weather for many years. The big lenses are fashioned from thick glass.The tops of the boilers are from specially tempered glass, the bottoms from stainless steel. The boiler tops are also lenses to further concentrate sunlight on the water. The shape of the boilers is roughly conical, with the point of the cone next to the axis of rotation of the boiler assembly. The exit point for the steam is higher up on the cone on top, while the water exit and entry is lower, below the cone. Sea water comes in from the lower opening to the boiler after excess water has been discarded with the salts.
Granted that neither energy nor salt will be produced in large amounts by our system, as useful byproducts energy and salt will make the installation more cost effective, perhaps making it marginally profitable. A small profit margin is all that is required. The solar distiller is a major capital expenditure, which if properly constructed, can last many decades.
Thus, the solar distiller will qualify for a bond issue, and after the bonds have been paid off, like a bridge or toll road, it will be an asset belonging to the community, to be used at the cost of maintenance only. If proven profitable, development may be financed by private companies or investors. Local people will not object as much out of nationalism to foreign investments, as they often do with oil or gas reserves, because sunlight is a renewable resource which will eventually revert to the people. When the project has shown its financial feasibility, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund will be confident in lending to credit-worthy poor countries which are interested in solar seawater distillation.
Very poor countries can distill seawater using low-tech equipment and manual labor. Imagine a metal bowl holding about 10 liters of seawater, covered tightly by a glass dome in the shape of a lens. A hose leaves the north side of the dome, spiraling down to an opaque bottle also of 10 liters, placed in the water of a trench, dug by the sea. The metal bowl is anchored on the ground next to the trench. When the bottle is full of water that has condensed from vapor, the villagers replace it with an empty one and refill the metal bowl with water. When the metal bowl has accumulated enough salt, the villagers scrape the salt off and package it for use or sale.
The water produced from evaporation is clean enough for drinking, washing, and bathing by people and animals; it may also be used to irrigate vegetable gardens.
Other low-tech ways exist for producing fresh water from seawater evaporation. On the west coast desert of Africa, a beetle spreads its gossamer wings in the morning fog by the sea, tilting its head down to the ground. Droplets from the fog condense and flow down to its head and mouth. Another instance of such distillation we find in Frank Herbert's fine science-fiction novel “Dune.” The native Fremen of the desert planet catch the evening fog, at the mouths of the caves where they live, with flimsy material like the beetle's wings, condensing it into bowls. The fog catching material can be weaved from inexpensive plastic fibers, framed like a fan to be opened and folded easily, and placed by the sea where early morning breezes pass, laden with moisture.
We have examined high-tech seawater distillation methods and low-tech ones. Now let's look at projections for super-tech approaches. Such methods might be weather control from space. Giant mirrors, lenses, and lasers in earth orbit could focus coherent light and energy to specific spots on the ocean to boil up water to steam. When clouds reach a desert area, immense shades in orbit could be opened to darken and cool the atmosphere so as to cause rainfall.
With weather control from satellites, artificial rainfall with cloud seeding, low tech and high tech distillation of seawater, all these technologies will alleviate fresh water shortages. Yet, all these methods will not suffice, nothing will suffice, as long as humans and their animals keep reproducing at current rates, as long as forests are burning in the tropics to uncover fragile soils for cultivation, as long as more trees are cut down for lumber than are planted, and as long as planetary warming goes on with the burning of fossil fuels.
We need to remember, taking to heart, the ecological disasters of Iceland, Easter Island, Taos, and the Aegean Isles, once thickly forested until people cut down too many trees, and then let loose grazing animals on the land. I remember as a boy in the Greek Youth Corps, planting baby pines and firs in a government program of reforestation. It was a happy experience for me. Today I plant trees on land I own whenever I get the chance. All of humanity should follow the example of the German and the Japanese people, who for centuries have looked after their forests with love and care.
Trees and other plants are natural humidifiers for the environment, holding rainwater in their roots, branches, and leaves, and releasing it to the
atmosphere slowly; they restrain heavy rains from washing down precious soil to the sea, permitting water to seep into the soil and appear further down as lovely
springs and rivulets. Whatever fresh water we have we can conserve better and use more wisely than we are doing now. In suburban neighborhoods I often see broken or defective sprinklers gushing the source of life, with the water police nowhere in sight. We could learn from the olive and the fig trees, also from the desert rat and beetle, how to handle water.
As much as I admire technology and such devices as I have described, I feel Nature on our blue-white planet is enough for us, if we respect and preserve it, and will give us enough fresh water for our needs—provided we keep our numbers in check.
By Basil Gala, Ph.D.
From space the Earth is mostly blue water, veiled with white vapor; a few brownish yellow patches are the deserts: Sahara, Arabia, Gobi, Australia's northwest. Seventy percent of Earth's surface is water, oceans deep enough to drown the Himalayas. Yet, fresh water is a precious resource, getting scarcer with growing human populations. The sun boils up much water into clouds, which drift over land, raining down, sometimes in great torrents; but in many land areas, it does not rain enough to sustain life well. For those areas human devices can use sunlight to distill sea water at a minimal cost after installation.
Sunlight is free and and plentiful where we need fresh water most, in deserts and arid areas: Southern California, Baha California, the Sahara, Arabia, and Australia. Seawater is not far from the same areas, except the Gobi. To concentrate sunlight on water for rapid boiling, we need mirrors, lenses, or a combination of both. Semiconductors to produce electricity for our machinery are also needed. Mirrors, lenses, and semiconductors are all made from silica sands, also plentiful in desert areas.
We also need capital and labor to fashion our materials into efficient distillation equipment. Poor, work-hungry local people can supply the labor; the industrialized nations have plenty of excess capital they are eager to invest for profit.
That's reasonable, as my dad would have said, so let's do it. If it's reasonable, my mom, would have countered, it's not practical. Why aren't people doing it?
So what's keeping us from launching enterprises for solar water distillation? It may be that we cannot earn enough profit, or any at all, with the use of available technology. I'd like to generate new ideas for both the technology and the economics; good ideas will make this industry boom eventually, since the fundamentals are right for its development. Again, that's reasonable, if people want to be that way, instead of starting new genocides or wars.
Make ideas, not wars. What's given? The sun rises somewhere in the east and sets somewhere in the west, the exact locations depending on the seasons. Mirrors or lenses have two motions, vertical and horizontal, to follow the sun as it travels in the sky. Our installation is close to the coast with canals or pipes bringing seawater to it. Pipes, rail, or trucks carry the distilled water where it's needed; salty minerals are taken away to plants for further processing. Electric turbines produce power from the steam generated as it is cooled, another valuable byproduct.
Mirror systems focusing sunlight on a boiler already exist in Arabia for the production of electricity with steam turbines. I visualize such a system of mirrors in a semicircle, directing sunlight to three or more lenses, which heat rotating boilers to increasingly higher temperatures. When the last boiler achieves superheated steam, the steam feeds a turbine and the residual very salty water drains to outside drying tanks. The empty boiler fills with sea water. Stopping briefly behind each lens, the boiler gets heated again for steam production. In this system, production of electricity and fresh water is continuous.
With the system installed, energy, fresh water, and salts are produced without polluting the environment; moreover, since sunlight is free, there are no costs other than maintenance. With plenty of fresh water and energy, crops thrive in the sunlit desert. Baha California can become a verdant paradise, and so can many coastal areas in North Africa, the Middle East and Australia. Trees can also be planted which will absorb some of the sun's energy impacting the Earth causing planetary warming.
Forests cool the environment and increase rainfall, pushing back desertification.
We have jumbed ahead in our story; let's look at some of the details of our design. Three or more mirrors opposite each lens reflect sunlight to it right to the edges. The mirrors are parabolic, expressed as y=ax². The parameter “a” is fixed based on the distance from the mirror to the lens, deciding how “open” the parabola is. Any reflected sunlight falling outside the lens is absorbed by semiconductors, which provide negative feedback to correct the position of the mirrors.
Although the three mirrors are oriented somewhat differently, because they have different positions, their deviations are fixed, so the servo mechanism on the lens can control them together. The mirrors do follow the sun's movement in the sky, but the servo controls are still needed for perfect focusing of the reflected sunlight. The lens focuses sunlight on the surface of the water in the boiler. This is accomplished because the boiler is tilted upwards towards the lens.
The mirrors of our system are not the kind you have in your bathroom; they are crafted from glass and highly polished stainless steel backing which can stand up to the weather for many years. The big lenses are fashioned from thick glass.The tops of the boilers are from specially tempered glass, the bottoms from stainless steel. The boiler tops are also lenses to further concentrate sunlight on the water. The shape of the boilers is roughly conical, with the point of the cone next to the axis of rotation of the boiler assembly. The exit point for the steam is higher up on the cone on top, while the water exit and entry is lower, below the cone. Sea water comes in from the lower opening to the boiler after excess water has been discarded with the salts.
Granted that neither energy nor salt will be produced in large amounts by our system, as useful byproducts energy and salt will make the installation more cost effective, perhaps making it marginally profitable. A small profit margin is all that is required. The solar distiller is a major capital expenditure, which if properly constructed, can last many decades.
Thus, the solar distiller will qualify for a bond issue, and after the bonds have been paid off, like a bridge or toll road, it will be an asset belonging to the community, to be used at the cost of maintenance only. If proven profitable, development may be financed by private companies or investors. Local people will not object as much out of nationalism to foreign investments, as they often do with oil or gas reserves, because sunlight is a renewable resource which will eventually revert to the people. When the project has shown its financial feasibility, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund will be confident in lending to credit-worthy poor countries which are interested in solar seawater distillation.
Very poor countries can distill seawater using low-tech equipment and manual labor. Imagine a metal bowl holding about 10 liters of seawater, covered tightly by a glass dome in the shape of a lens. A hose leaves the north side of the dome, spiraling down to an opaque bottle also of 10 liters, placed in the water of a trench, dug by the sea. The metal bowl is anchored on the ground next to the trench. When the bottle is full of water that has condensed from vapor, the villagers replace it with an empty one and refill the metal bowl with water. When the metal bowl has accumulated enough salt, the villagers scrape the salt off and package it for use or sale.
The water produced from evaporation is clean enough for drinking, washing, and bathing by people and animals; it may also be used to irrigate vegetable gardens.
Other low-tech ways exist for producing fresh water from seawater evaporation. On the west coast desert of Africa, a beetle spreads its gossamer wings in the morning fog by the sea, tilting its head down to the ground. Droplets from the fog condense and flow down to its head and mouth. Another instance of such distillation we find in Frank Herbert's fine science-fiction novel “Dune.” The native Fremen of the desert planet catch the evening fog, at the mouths of the caves where they live, with flimsy material like the beetle's wings, condensing it into bowls. The fog catching material can be weaved from inexpensive plastic fibers, framed like a fan to be opened and folded easily, and placed by the sea where early morning breezes pass, laden with moisture.
We have examined high-tech seawater distillation methods and low-tech ones. Now let's look at projections for super-tech approaches. Such methods might be weather control from space. Giant mirrors, lenses, and lasers in earth orbit could focus coherent light and energy to specific spots on the ocean to boil up water to steam. When clouds reach a desert area, immense shades in orbit could be opened to darken and cool the atmosphere so as to cause rainfall.
With weather control from satellites, artificial rainfall with cloud seeding, low tech and high tech distillation of seawater, all these technologies will alleviate fresh water shortages. Yet, all these methods will not suffice, nothing will suffice, as long as humans and their animals keep reproducing at current rates, as long as forests are burning in the tropics to uncover fragile soils for cultivation, as long as more trees are cut down for lumber than are planted, and as long as planetary warming goes on with the burning of fossil fuels.
We need to remember, taking to heart, the ecological disasters of Iceland, Easter Island, Taos, and the Aegean Isles, once thickly forested until people cut down too many trees, and then let loose grazing animals on the land. I remember as a boy in the Greek Youth Corps, planting baby pines and firs in a government program of reforestation. It was a happy experience for me. Today I plant trees on land I own whenever I get the chance. All of humanity should follow the example of the German and the Japanese people, who for centuries have looked after their forests with love and care.
Trees and other plants are natural humidifiers for the environment, holding rainwater in their roots, branches, and leaves, and releasing it to the
atmosphere slowly; they restrain heavy rains from washing down precious soil to the sea, permitting water to seep into the soil and appear further down as lovely
springs and rivulets. Whatever fresh water we have we can conserve better and use more wisely than we are doing now. In suburban neighborhoods I often see broken or defective sprinklers gushing the source of life, with the water police nowhere in sight. We could learn from the olive and the fig trees, also from the desert rat and beetle, how to handle water.
As much as I admire technology and such devices as I have described, I feel Nature on our blue-white planet is enough for us, if we respect and preserve it, and will give us enough fresh water for our needs—provided we keep our numbers in check.
Money: The Source of All Evil?
Money: The Source of All Evil?
By Basil Gala, Ph.D. (5,680 words)
Human societies have used coins as tokens for commercial transactions thousands of years before Christ. Kings minted coins, often from valuable metals such as gold or silver, stamped with the royal mug. Paper money came later in China with the printing press invention and since then the presses have been running furiously. My mother never trusted paper money. I can understand my mother’s feelings. When her Greek family escaped from Turkey in the war of 1922, they had gold coins covered with cloth as buttons on their clothes. When silver coins were circulating in the United States, my mother’s savings account was a bag with silver dollars, quarters, and dimes. We laughed about this quirk of hers until the government took the silver coins out of circulation and, almost overnight, the contents of her bag became very valuable. She gave all the silver coins to friends as gifts and kept a box with copper pennies, which I inherited from my mother when she died and I still possess. Copper is now appreciating rapidly. You see, money is the source of evil as much as fire, knives, or the wheel are sources of evil.
Money has many uses, good and bad. You can feed daughters and sons with your cash, or your addictions, like overeating, drug use, laziness, or greed. In my life of three quarters of a century, I have been rich and I have been poor; being poor was not so bad for me being of a philosophical bend, provided I had enough to eat and a place to sleep. Rich was better; I was somewhat happier having money to spare. Money sufficient for our needs is very good to have.
Coin money in particular is valuable for deciding things when we cannot make up our minds: we toss a coin: heads you lose, tales, I win. Coins come in a great variety of materials, shapes, and sizes. Collectors drive up the price of rare coins in mint condition. A silver dollar is now many times the value of a paper dollar. A gold coin is even better. Years ago when gold was at $250 an ounce I bought a golden eagle, which is now worth $800. I had planned to buy more coins, but I found other uses for my dollars, such as raising two daughters; their value appreciated also.
The largest coins are the rai, made in Micronesia by Yap islanders from limestone quarries on Palau. The rai were made with a hole in the middle to carry them with a pole. Once transported to Yap they stayed in one place and only the ownership changed after a business transaction; not surprising, since the largest rai could be 10 feet in diameter and weigh 8,000 pounds. Once when two chiefs tossed a rai to decide who would lead an expedition, the loser was thoroughly crushed.
Our own chiefs, charming political leaders, elected or self-anointed, and their government officials like to play certain games with your money. One of their favorite games is inflation. Your great leader promised to cut your taxes and provide you with more government services, grants, projects, subsidies, or welfare. So your leader pressures the central bank to print more currency and ease credit to pay for the government’s generosities. The result is a larger national debt, or inflation: more paper currency chasing fewer goods, driving prices up.
If you complain too much about the higher prices, you leader orders a price freeze and you end up with a scarcity of goods because companies can’t make a profit making them. Of course, goods are available on what politicians like to call “the black market.” Such a market is a free market where goods are traded fairly and a market which pays enough to produce things at a profit.
Inflation is what happens to paper money, as opposed to gold, when a government prints too much of it, a very bad thing for the economy, when prices rise up and run away from the money. Inflation can happen to a currency of gold too, if much gold is unearthed to trade for the products on sale; but that has happened rarely in the past. Now, if some day someone can transmute iron into gold in a nuclear furnace, your gold coins would become about as valuable as the quarters we now use in a commercial laundry.
I remember the runaway inflation of World War II in Greece at the end of the Nazi occupation. Bills of drachmas had a 1 followed by a string of zeros that ran off the edge of the paper. You needed a bag of bills to buy a package of cigarettes. The town where my family lived at that time had tobacco factories. So people switched to a cigarette currency. Single cigarettes were like pennies, packs like dollars, and cartons like twenties. We went to market with a bag full of cigarettes and returned home with bread, butter, and beans.
Today your officials in the United States allow for a small rate of inflation of two or three percent, judged by them to be benign. Their theory is that some inflation stimulates spending and keeps the economy moving. It’s like a tax on the money you hide under your mattress or in a jar. No wonder learned economists chastise us Americans for saving so little of our income compared to other nations like the Japanese. If you decide to bank your savings, you are earning four or five percent in interest, which is taxable. So, with bank savings you lose some money to inflation and some to income tax, thereby just breaking even. Your bank lends the money out to other people, who go ahead and buy what they want with it, while you have deferred gratification.
The more affluent among us defer spending, save, and invest. The poor do the opposite: a family in the United States with an income of less than $20,000 a year is officially poor, requiring tax breaks, welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, and housing subsidies. The lifestyles of our poor would be the envy of most people in Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, or Haiti. Most of the world’s people are poor by our government’s definition or any other standard, thus deserving our help and protection. Jesus blessed the poor and admonished his rich followers to give all they possessed to the poor and follow in his path. He said something to the effect that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Not many rich took Jesus’ advice then, after Jesus passed on, or in our days. What’s so great about the poor anyway? To me the poor appear to be stupid, lazy, filthy, unhealthy, and weak of will. Worst of all, the poor have little money, and they are unlucky: they picked poor parents.
Moreover, the poor are promiscuous, with more teenage pregnancies, frequently living in sin, and begetting more brats than the rest of us. Of course, they have more childhood deaths from disease and malnutrition than affluent people. That is, until Bill Gates and other rich people begin providing free inoculations and meals. In history, when the U.S. took over Puerto Rico from the Spanish, Americans drained the swamps and provided health care. Thereby, the Puerto Rican population exploded, but fortunately there was room for them in New York City, meaning there was work for them in the garment factories, restaurants, and hotels.
Which leads us to the conclusion that we need the poor to produce workers; that’s why we have so many illegal immigrants from South of the Border. Where would we find the workers for our kitchens, yards and factories to serve the wealthy here in America? Sure, we can import manufactured products from China and India, but what about local services, such as construction, cleaning, gardening, nursing, auto repairing, and cooking? God forbid, we would have to do all this labor with our own hands. Our poor could do this work, but they are content collecting welfare. Therefore, we employ illegal immigrants (they are generally simpatico), but we squawk about them crossing the border to come to us, instead of waiting two centuries for their immigration papers. Our Latino workers will be fine as long as they remain illegal, but once they get citizenship and go on welfare, we’re back to square one.
Let’s look at a little history of poverty. JFK waged war on the moon, Cuba, and nearly the Soviet Union, but LBJ, who followed him as Chief Democrat, fought an undeclared war in Viet Nam and an open War on Poverty. LBJ’s idea was to eradicate poverty by throwing money at the poor. Now, granted that the sufferings of the poor rouse our pity and compassion, that the poor are less likely to riot when they are handed cash, that some poor were victims of social injustice, and granted that all men (and women) are created equal (so scribbled Jefferson) and given the vote, why would you feed the poor and expect to have fewer of them? Again, granted that the poor are human beings deserving our respect, not insects, but if roaches took up residence in your house, would you lay out food for them? La cucaracha, la cucaracha!
LBJ’s great social experiment failed after government had thrown a great many dollars in the winds of his wars, rapidly increasing U. S. debt and bringing on a wave of inflation and economic stagnation to bedevil Jimmy Carter. Fortunately, our Puritan ethics prevailed again during the Reagan years. The country went back to work, industry unleashed from regulations surged ahead, we stayed out of major conflicts, and profit incentives did their miracle to boost technology, bringing prosperity back. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and the U.S. cut back on defense expenditures, enjoying a peace dividend during the Clinton presidency. Then we got the dotcom boom and the bust, the Bush tax cuts, 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, the money spigots opening wide, careening real estate and the economy on a roller coaster. With much less weight, dollars were flying in the winds again.
The value of dollars is set by the Central Bank of the United States which issues currency for money at the Mint, manages credit and money with the Federal Reserve Board, a powerful Chairman at the helm. In 2008, Ben Bernanke was the Chairman, and before him Alan Greenspan, the Oracle of the Board, and before him Paul Volcker, appointed by President Carter, and serving continuously under Reagan. The appointment to the chair of the FRB is for four years and thus the chair is said to be independent of the current administration. Yeah, but the administration has influence over the FRB. Volcker was a strong money guy and brutally slammed the breaks on the money wagon in 1980, letting interest rates go over 18%. The economy went into a tailspin for about six months. Before the election, Volcker had pressed on the money gas for a while, and I was able to sell my real estate in California and invest in Oregon property. So much for the independence of the FRB!
After Reagan was elected, Volcker stepped on the breaks again; we got a double-dip recession in 1981. Oregon went into depression, and after struggling with my properties in that state for a few years, I went belly up. In 1985 I returned to California to scratch for money in real estate where I had made my money in the first place, and real estate went booming again in California--until 1991. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, the Federal government closed many military bases in California and much of the defense industry shut down. Property prices dropped as much as 50%; now California real estate was in depression. I thanked President George Bush (the father) and Alan Greenspan for making me poor again, and I began to concentrate on my spiritual growth.
I was among the blessed poor until 1996 when California real estate picked up again and I started making some lovely money. Like most people, I like money--all kinds of money. How many kinds of money are there? First, there is M0, which is cash in circulation. Second, we have demand deposits, M1, such as checking accounts. You write a check and if your balance can cover it, it's money to the recipient. Otherwise, the check is known as rubber. As the young girl said to her father, "Dad, don't worry. I have money." And she pointed to a bunch of blank checks. What followed was the $110 pizza she ordered: $10 for the pizza itself, plus $25 charged by the pizza parlor, plus $25 debited by her bank, plus $50 when the check was re-deposited by the pizzeria.
After check money, we have M2, sometimes called near money, because you can access it quickly, such as bonds, stocks, certificates of deposit, etc. Basically, money is any token used in an exchange, legal or not. A token is a signal between people allowing a transaction. It can be a debit or credit in a computer system. Debit is money charged to your account; something like a debt. Credit is an allowance you can draw upon to spend, or simply income earned or given to you. M0, M1, and M2 combined are called M3.
Now I shall go beyond these customary money abbreviations. Plastic money, credit cards, is M4. When I was in college, cigarette companies passed out little packets of cigarettes to students for free; these days, banks pass out credit cards to college students. If you have equity in your home (value after the mortgage due is deducted) you can convert that to cash; that's M5. Hey, have your grandparents left you a trust fund to draw on for a college education, or a secure income, because they loved you but thought you were an idiot? You can borrow on your trust fund and spend the money all at once; that's M6. Do you have wealthy relatives aging fast and going gaga? You can pressure them to bequeath some of their money to you now, M7. Have you got good paper and a color copier? Counterfeit money is M8. Do you possess a kilo of cocaine? That is worth thousands of dollars on the street, M9. Can you get hold of a gun and are you willing to use it? You have M10.
No need for you to sneer at M10 money. The Spaniard came to America for M10 with sword and musket, getting tons of gold in exchange for the Catholic religion. Spain became the richest and most powerful European nation until the rise of the English. Financed by Elizabeth the Great, Sir Francis Drake raided the Spanish galleons, pirating their gold cargoes. He made himself and his Queen rich, and received great honors as a privateer.
If you don't like violent M10, consider M11 which you get with deft fingers, stolen money; or begging money, M12: "Daddy, do you love me?" "Of course, I love you, darling." "Daddy, lend me $20 for the movies tonight." On the street: "Sir, my car is out of gas. Can you spare a few dollars so I can get home?"
Finally, we have OPM, other people's money, or M13. If you can solicit well money from investors, philanthropists, or taxes, you can create piles of M13, a very liquid form of money, easily spent on six-thousand dollar shower curtains, fancy charity balls, fabulous vacations, private jets, and other jaunts.
Even time is money, said Ben Franklin; true if people are working to produce or market goods and services in the time available to them. Forget that dictum if people are chatting around the water cooler, or gossiping with friends instead of working. Fame is money too, and so is notoriety. You can convert it to money by publishing your story, making guest appearances, or endorsing products; so don't knock the paparazzi. Call fame M14. Monica Lewinsky got a million dollars for her book on the fine art of cigar making for Bill Clinton; but Clinton got even more M14 for his memoirs, and so did Dick Nixon, whom we don't have around to kick any more.
Lastly, political or military office and connections are readily convertible to money, M15. Profit in politics is not strictly from graft, although that is the case in many countries, especially in Africa, the Middle East, South America, and Asia. In the U.S., officials earn a modest salary when in service, but after leaving their posts, companies pay them high fees or salaries to manage their affairs, taking advantage of the knowledge and the connections ex-officials possess; ex-officials make excellent lobbyists.
Besides different kinds of money we also have high or low velocities of money. Sometimes money circulates very fast, other times very slowly. When you put cash under your mattress, you take something out of the speed of money. When you spend money right after you get it, then you give it an extra boost in speed, increasing the number of transactions in the economy. People will spend money quickly when money is losing value, as in an inflationary period, thus making inflation worse by effectively boosting the money supply. When consumers become pessimistic about their finances and their jobs, they pull in their horns, spend less, and velocity drops. In effect, any delay by anybody in making a transaction reduces the flow of money and economic activity. A drop in economic activity in a recession tends to feed on itself, because the quantity of money and its velocity both go down. A professor talking about the velocity of money to a young blond at a gathering got this response: "I can understand that," she gushed. "Money simply flies out of my purse."
When the quantity and velocity of money go down in the business cycle, producers lower their prices, stores have fire sales, and consumers go shopping for bargains, boosting the economy again.
With the economy growing, jobs are plentiful, profits and wages go up, people are confident, spending freely. Economic expansion leads to money growth, and money growth leads to more economic expansion; so economic boom times feed on themselves causing a greater boom, an economic bubble. People buy more stocks and property; they borrow more money to buy more assets, and as profits come in, people spend or give to their spouses to spend part of their income. Eventually some people decide it's time to sell assets, locking in their profits, and the stage is set for markets to decline precipitously and for a recession. Now contraction begins again in the money supply and the economy. Hold your breath or start screaming: the roller coaster is going down.
Money going down or up, for some people either case is an opportunity for profit. Money guys place their bets cleverly, perpetually piling up wealth. Inevitably, money accumulates in the hands of a few families in the country, who also hold the power, the fame, and the influence. If a government were to seize everybody's assets, distribute wealth equally to all adults, and leave things alone, the money and power would be back in the hands of the same people in one generation or sooner, so it happened in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That is because the same cleverly acquisitive people will work hard, save, invest cooperate, and deal advantageously; the vast majority of those who get government largess blow their cash on instant gratifications and other idiocies, getting back to where they started financially.
The concentration of money, in the hands of the few, is it good or bad for our nation? It depends on what sort of people the chosen few are. Power and wealth may corrupt, or may enlighten. Great culture has sprung from the hands of the noble rich, guided by philosopher lords, such as those of the Golden Age of Greece or the Italian Renaissance. Sometimes wealth simply leads to crass displays and degradation. "The rich are different from us," said F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was much impressed by great wealth. "Yes," responded Ernest Hemingway with a smile, "the rich have more money."
The rich get richer and the poor, poorer, until the revolution comes and a new government starts soaking the rich with taxes and distributing the proceeds to the poor with cash grants, food stamps, health care, housing, or unemployment benefits. Such a social program does not work, because then successful people move to other countries with their assets and money, the super rich bank in the Bahamas and other tax havens, poor people become lazy and riotous. The middle class is left to shoulder the burden of heavy taxes, becoming discouraged, apathetic, and ready to quit work to join in the handouts. Inflation ensues after productivity has dropped; and the nation, which was once prosperous, becomes impoverished. Hurrah for socialism!
No, dump socialism and let those who earn good money with their efforts, spend it as they wish, levying on them only those taxes necessary for defense, infrastructure, education with training, and policing. Money earned by anybody is spent one way or another and circulates out to those who provide useful services or goods.
A myriad of goods are available to every person willing to make them or sell them to those who possess money, including the inexhaustible resources of human imagination, thus rewarding the smart worker, circulating money, and creating new money or credit. You see, production of goods comes first, then selling and money creation. Thus a society that trains and encourages all the people to produce more goods and better goods will grow and benefit all. The big producers will have an excess of cash which they will invest and re-invest, as long as they save the excess, to build new plants, offices, farms, and R & D facilities. What is not consumed can be exported, earning more wealth for the nation. If people produce instead too many offspring, which they are unable to train well for high-wage jobs, their nation is left with too many young mouths to feed, and hungry mouths are attached to bodies that pick up guns to slaughter others, as is the case in some African, South American, and Middle Eastern countries.
I have been railing here with derision against the poor and poverty itself as a condition of life; yet, I am willing to accept poverty as an ideology, willingly undertaken by some individuals who want to be free to pursue spiritual, scientific, artistic, or philosophical ends. I think of the case of the Greek Cynic and ascetic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, who lived happily in a tub, wanting only to sit in front of his home to enjoy the sunlight, meditating. An admiring Alexander the Great in youth came between Diogenes and the sun and asked the old man what he could do for him. “Stand out of my light,” answered Diogenes.
Another philosopher, and scientist, of ancient Greece, Thales of Miletus lived simply and solved astronomical problems, but I suppose too many people teased him with, “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” So one year around 600 BC, Thales predicted the weather and the harvest for olives to be excellent. Leasing all the olive presses in Miletus for the season, he showed his townspeople he could enrich himself with his intelligence.
The Buddha’s father was a king and a wealthy merchant was the father of St. Francis of Assisi, but their sons donned clothes of beggars and went to the streets to preach their faith.
Vincent van Gogh lived in dire poverty his entire life of 37 years, while creating masterpieces of painting, each traded for many millions of dollars today. In his life, van Gogh managed to sell one piece of art from his prodigious output for a few francs to buy painting supplies.
Van Gogh was Dutch, a people generally very respectful of money, as are the Jews. After so many centuries of being persecuted in Europe where they sought refuge, Jews have learned the value of money for their survival. Highly portable money like silver, gold, diamonds, all were most useful for bribing officials and escaping to America. In the United States, Jews make up about 2% of the population, but they are one third of all millionaires, earning the highest income of any other ethnic group. I say, more power to them: Jews give to charity, support the arts and sciences, and supply major talents in law, medicine, science, and business; and if an alcoholic writer needs a quick loan, he can always find a Jewish pawnbroker nearby to hock his notebook computer for a bottle or two of his favorite escape. Pawnshop loans are expensive, but they don’t compare with loans an unlucky gambler may get from his friendly Mafia loan shark. Loan sharks lend at 10% or more interest (called juice) each week, and if the unfortunate gambler doesn’t pay back the principal when due, he is likely to find one of his legs bending at an impossible angle; thus, both good and evil flow from money.
Like organized crime, capitalism concentrates money or credit in private hands. Capitalism, however, applies this money like stored energy to productive purposes in serving the needs of those able to buy goods. Capital is backed by physical resources available for large projects of production. The pyramid builders of Egypt could not have created these marvelous tourist sights to bury their Pharaohs without the necessary grains from the Nile valley in granaries to feed the workers. Money is a fictional character with the magic of creation only when backed by real stuff like land, oil, energy, food, minerals, etc. Do capitalists exploit the poor workers, paying them meager wages for bare survival, while owners of the money, investors, enrich themselves more with fat profits? No, it is not so in a free society, where workers can go to another company for employment, where companies compete for valuable employees and profits with other businesses, and people can travel freely to the best jobs for which they are trained. Only an autocratic or socialistic government can enslave people by forbidding them to compete and to move from place to place where the opportunities are. The people who save, accumulate, and invest their money in enterprises create the opportunities for employment for those who have not done so.
In this connection, consider the parable of talants or talents, a story told by Jesus, where a master gave to a servant five talents, to another servant two talents, and to a third servant one talent, a large silver or gold coin representing wages for 6,000 days of labor. The servants who got the five and two talents invested the money and returned the talents to their master with interest, but the third servant buried the money in the ground and returned only the one talent to the master. The master severely punished that silly servant. Well, this was a story about spiritual values, but it applies to crass old money too. If a person does not to invest, that person goes to the outer darkness and misery of poverty.
Not so in America where we have the privilege hearing from preachers who praise money to heaven, thanks to our Calvinist traditions. Churches generally support the accumulation of wealth. The faithful contribute more to the church coffers with their tithes. The Mormon Church gets 10% of the earnings from each member, who is often successful in business, in spite of producing a large family, for the growth and glory of the Church. Lay preachers like Napoleon Hill, the success guru from the thirties, declared God wants us to be rich, and we can all be rich by visualizing wealth, seeking our vision with strong desire and persistent action.
Others have pursued the idea that money is evil or unnecessary and should be abolished. This happens in the science fiction series of Star Trek, where money has no value; only information has value. Given the right information, super computers in the Enterprise can synthesize any material: gold, diamonds, gourmet dishes. For some time, people have objected to the production of currency by a central bank, with most money reserves ending up in the coffers of a few powerful men or women. As a substitute to money we have been offered Ithaca Hours, of Ithaca, New York: one Ithaca Hour is worth about $10, the cost of labor for one hour, issued to members who have joined the exchange group. This is a form of local currency, similar to the Freigeld (free money in German) to be used locally, bearing an expiration date like food, so that it is passed on to others promptly. Such money makes some exchanges possible, but a brain surgeon is unlikely to accept it for his services.
Ultimately, everything depends on human ingenuity and labor to give it value; even land, sea, and space must be defended by men and women to protect the riches they hold. Jacob in the Old Testament, son of Isaac, worked for seven years to win the hand of Rachel, his cousin, tending flocks of animals for his uncle Laban. But Laban deceived him and gave him his eldest daughter Leah in marriage. Well, Jacob labored another seven years for Rachel, but in the end he was rewarded with twelve sons from his two wives and two concubines, who sired the twelve Tribes of Israel. Jacob was a hell of a worker, but where did he get all this energy? I am exhausted just reading about it. Those ancient men had powerful seeds, but not so the ancient women; the women were like the earth to be plowed.
I digress; this is a story about money. Most nations like to print their own fiat money, governments exchanging paper for goods, raising the money supply to stimulate the economy or lowering it to curb inflation. For trading among nations the U. S. dollar rules, the world’s reserve currency since WWII; the euro is catching up as of this writing, with more euros in circulation than dollars. Nations can fix the exchange rate for their currency versus the dollar or let the currency float in the money markets. China pegs the yuan low to boost exports, but that causes inflation in China because of the higher cost of imports and the rapid growth of the economy. If you can master out the intricacies of currency exchange, you can become a billionaire, like George Soros, born in 1930 Hungary, as GyÖrgy Schwartz. You can then turn to philanthropy.
The key to success in currency exchange is to believe the opposite of what your government asserts. If officials say the dollar will remain strong, you can be sure it will weaken. Act accordingly.
A currency is strong, going up, or weak, going down in exchanges, depending on the success of the issuing nation in trade with other countries. If we work hard and efficiently, selling more stuff to other countries than they sell to us, the dollar will appreciate. Again, in a free world market, the dollar will fall when we import more than we export, which has been the case for the U.S. for some years now. Wealth has been flowing out of our country to Japan, China, Europe, and the oil producing nations. In theory, as the dollar drops, we should be exporting more to equalize trade, provided we produce things other countries want to buy from us. In turns out, most countries really want our debt and our assets, not our products so much. So, keep on borrowing and buying America.
In America now and in the past, money tended to cluster in certain large cities, not villages. In ancient Greece, that was Athens. In Renaissance Italy, wealth flourished in Florence, Venice, Milan, and Rome. Later on, Midas settled in Amsterdam, Madrid, Vienna. Today, we have major centers of finance in London, New York, Paris, Zurich, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. It is no coincidence that culture flourishes in places of high finance. Money is an essential but not a sufficient ingredient to high culture. Creative people need money to live, survive, and create those things of culture we value greatly which are not necessities for the masses. A milieu of refined people of rank, finance, and good taste, sons and daughters of Pericles, are required to provide the means for cultural growth.
For economic growth in the world, we would do better with one currency instead of many. The benefits for trade and financial stability would be great with money in the hands of a World Reserve Bank, run by a staff of competent, wise, impartial, and expert officials. Some economists argue against a world currency, that it would not allow a nation to raise or lower the money supply as needed for the nation. Yes, and that would be a good thing, freeing money from the manipulations of politicians. Thus the euro was established and has been become valuable and stable over the years, although Italy and other countries complain about its strength. Basically, we have no universal currency, although it makes sense, as we don’t have a world government and peace among nations. It is time for the G8 group, and others, such as China and India, to institute such a currency, let’s call it the talent, to promote free trade further, eliminating any remaining artificial barriers. At this time, the closest thing to universal money is the U.S. dollar, the closest to a world government is the U.S. officialdom, the closest to a universal language is English, and the closest to a universal religion is the Unitarian Church. But we cannot count on the supremacy of the U. S. to continue, challenged as it is by Europe, Russia, China, India, and the Muslim countries.
Vista, February 2008
By Basil Gala, Ph.D. (5,680 words)
Human societies have used coins as tokens for commercial transactions thousands of years before Christ. Kings minted coins, often from valuable metals such as gold or silver, stamped with the royal mug. Paper money came later in China with the printing press invention and since then the presses have been running furiously. My mother never trusted paper money. I can understand my mother’s feelings. When her Greek family escaped from Turkey in the war of 1922, they had gold coins covered with cloth as buttons on their clothes. When silver coins were circulating in the United States, my mother’s savings account was a bag with silver dollars, quarters, and dimes. We laughed about this quirk of hers until the government took the silver coins out of circulation and, almost overnight, the contents of her bag became very valuable. She gave all the silver coins to friends as gifts and kept a box with copper pennies, which I inherited from my mother when she died and I still possess. Copper is now appreciating rapidly. You see, money is the source of evil as much as fire, knives, or the wheel are sources of evil.
Money has many uses, good and bad. You can feed daughters and sons with your cash, or your addictions, like overeating, drug use, laziness, or greed. In my life of three quarters of a century, I have been rich and I have been poor; being poor was not so bad for me being of a philosophical bend, provided I had enough to eat and a place to sleep. Rich was better; I was somewhat happier having money to spare. Money sufficient for our needs is very good to have.
Coin money in particular is valuable for deciding things when we cannot make up our minds: we toss a coin: heads you lose, tales, I win. Coins come in a great variety of materials, shapes, and sizes. Collectors drive up the price of rare coins in mint condition. A silver dollar is now many times the value of a paper dollar. A gold coin is even better. Years ago when gold was at $250 an ounce I bought a golden eagle, which is now worth $800. I had planned to buy more coins, but I found other uses for my dollars, such as raising two daughters; their value appreciated also.
The largest coins are the rai, made in Micronesia by Yap islanders from limestone quarries on Palau. The rai were made with a hole in the middle to carry them with a pole. Once transported to Yap they stayed in one place and only the ownership changed after a business transaction; not surprising, since the largest rai could be 10 feet in diameter and weigh 8,000 pounds. Once when two chiefs tossed a rai to decide who would lead an expedition, the loser was thoroughly crushed.
Our own chiefs, charming political leaders, elected or self-anointed, and their government officials like to play certain games with your money. One of their favorite games is inflation. Your great leader promised to cut your taxes and provide you with more government services, grants, projects, subsidies, or welfare. So your leader pressures the central bank to print more currency and ease credit to pay for the government’s generosities. The result is a larger national debt, or inflation: more paper currency chasing fewer goods, driving prices up.
If you complain too much about the higher prices, you leader orders a price freeze and you end up with a scarcity of goods because companies can’t make a profit making them. Of course, goods are available on what politicians like to call “the black market.” Such a market is a free market where goods are traded fairly and a market which pays enough to produce things at a profit.
Inflation is what happens to paper money, as opposed to gold, when a government prints too much of it, a very bad thing for the economy, when prices rise up and run away from the money. Inflation can happen to a currency of gold too, if much gold is unearthed to trade for the products on sale; but that has happened rarely in the past. Now, if some day someone can transmute iron into gold in a nuclear furnace, your gold coins would become about as valuable as the quarters we now use in a commercial laundry.
I remember the runaway inflation of World War II in Greece at the end of the Nazi occupation. Bills of drachmas had a 1 followed by a string of zeros that ran off the edge of the paper. You needed a bag of bills to buy a package of cigarettes. The town where my family lived at that time had tobacco factories. So people switched to a cigarette currency. Single cigarettes were like pennies, packs like dollars, and cartons like twenties. We went to market with a bag full of cigarettes and returned home with bread, butter, and beans.
Today your officials in the United States allow for a small rate of inflation of two or three percent, judged by them to be benign. Their theory is that some inflation stimulates spending and keeps the economy moving. It’s like a tax on the money you hide under your mattress or in a jar. No wonder learned economists chastise us Americans for saving so little of our income compared to other nations like the Japanese. If you decide to bank your savings, you are earning four or five percent in interest, which is taxable. So, with bank savings you lose some money to inflation and some to income tax, thereby just breaking even. Your bank lends the money out to other people, who go ahead and buy what they want with it, while you have deferred gratification.
The more affluent among us defer spending, save, and invest. The poor do the opposite: a family in the United States with an income of less than $20,000 a year is officially poor, requiring tax breaks, welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, and housing subsidies. The lifestyles of our poor would be the envy of most people in Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, or Haiti. Most of the world’s people are poor by our government’s definition or any other standard, thus deserving our help and protection. Jesus blessed the poor and admonished his rich followers to give all they possessed to the poor and follow in his path. He said something to the effect that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Not many rich took Jesus’ advice then, after Jesus passed on, or in our days. What’s so great about the poor anyway? To me the poor appear to be stupid, lazy, filthy, unhealthy, and weak of will. Worst of all, the poor have little money, and they are unlucky: they picked poor parents.
Moreover, the poor are promiscuous, with more teenage pregnancies, frequently living in sin, and begetting more brats than the rest of us. Of course, they have more childhood deaths from disease and malnutrition than affluent people. That is, until Bill Gates and other rich people begin providing free inoculations and meals. In history, when the U.S. took over Puerto Rico from the Spanish, Americans drained the swamps and provided health care. Thereby, the Puerto Rican population exploded, but fortunately there was room for them in New York City, meaning there was work for them in the garment factories, restaurants, and hotels.
Which leads us to the conclusion that we need the poor to produce workers; that’s why we have so many illegal immigrants from South of the Border. Where would we find the workers for our kitchens, yards and factories to serve the wealthy here in America? Sure, we can import manufactured products from China and India, but what about local services, such as construction, cleaning, gardening, nursing, auto repairing, and cooking? God forbid, we would have to do all this labor with our own hands. Our poor could do this work, but they are content collecting welfare. Therefore, we employ illegal immigrants (they are generally simpatico), but we squawk about them crossing the border to come to us, instead of waiting two centuries for their immigration papers. Our Latino workers will be fine as long as they remain illegal, but once they get citizenship and go on welfare, we’re back to square one.
Let’s look at a little history of poverty. JFK waged war on the moon, Cuba, and nearly the Soviet Union, but LBJ, who followed him as Chief Democrat, fought an undeclared war in Viet Nam and an open War on Poverty. LBJ’s idea was to eradicate poverty by throwing money at the poor. Now, granted that the sufferings of the poor rouse our pity and compassion, that the poor are less likely to riot when they are handed cash, that some poor were victims of social injustice, and granted that all men (and women) are created equal (so scribbled Jefferson) and given the vote, why would you feed the poor and expect to have fewer of them? Again, granted that the poor are human beings deserving our respect, not insects, but if roaches took up residence in your house, would you lay out food for them? La cucaracha, la cucaracha!
LBJ’s great social experiment failed after government had thrown a great many dollars in the winds of his wars, rapidly increasing U. S. debt and bringing on a wave of inflation and economic stagnation to bedevil Jimmy Carter. Fortunately, our Puritan ethics prevailed again during the Reagan years. The country went back to work, industry unleashed from regulations surged ahead, we stayed out of major conflicts, and profit incentives did their miracle to boost technology, bringing prosperity back. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed and the U.S. cut back on defense expenditures, enjoying a peace dividend during the Clinton presidency. Then we got the dotcom boom and the bust, the Bush tax cuts, 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, the money spigots opening wide, careening real estate and the economy on a roller coaster. With much less weight, dollars were flying in the winds again.
The value of dollars is set by the Central Bank of the United States which issues currency for money at the Mint, manages credit and money with the Federal Reserve Board, a powerful Chairman at the helm. In 2008, Ben Bernanke was the Chairman, and before him Alan Greenspan, the Oracle of the Board, and before him Paul Volcker, appointed by President Carter, and serving continuously under Reagan. The appointment to the chair of the FRB is for four years and thus the chair is said to be independent of the current administration. Yeah, but the administration has influence over the FRB. Volcker was a strong money guy and brutally slammed the breaks on the money wagon in 1980, letting interest rates go over 18%. The economy went into a tailspin for about six months. Before the election, Volcker had pressed on the money gas for a while, and I was able to sell my real estate in California and invest in Oregon property. So much for the independence of the FRB!
After Reagan was elected, Volcker stepped on the breaks again; we got a double-dip recession in 1981. Oregon went into depression, and after struggling with my properties in that state for a few years, I went belly up. In 1985 I returned to California to scratch for money in real estate where I had made my money in the first place, and real estate went booming again in California--until 1991. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, the Federal government closed many military bases in California and much of the defense industry shut down. Property prices dropped as much as 50%; now California real estate was in depression. I thanked President George Bush (the father) and Alan Greenspan for making me poor again, and I began to concentrate on my spiritual growth.
I was among the blessed poor until 1996 when California real estate picked up again and I started making some lovely money. Like most people, I like money--all kinds of money. How many kinds of money are there? First, there is M0, which is cash in circulation. Second, we have demand deposits, M1, such as checking accounts. You write a check and if your balance can cover it, it's money to the recipient. Otherwise, the check is known as rubber. As the young girl said to her father, "Dad, don't worry. I have money." And she pointed to a bunch of blank checks. What followed was the $110 pizza she ordered: $10 for the pizza itself, plus $25 charged by the pizza parlor, plus $25 debited by her bank, plus $50 when the check was re-deposited by the pizzeria.
After check money, we have M2, sometimes called near money, because you can access it quickly, such as bonds, stocks, certificates of deposit, etc. Basically, money is any token used in an exchange, legal or not. A token is a signal between people allowing a transaction. It can be a debit or credit in a computer system. Debit is money charged to your account; something like a debt. Credit is an allowance you can draw upon to spend, or simply income earned or given to you. M0, M1, and M2 combined are called M3.
Now I shall go beyond these customary money abbreviations. Plastic money, credit cards, is M4. When I was in college, cigarette companies passed out little packets of cigarettes to students for free; these days, banks pass out credit cards to college students. If you have equity in your home (value after the mortgage due is deducted) you can convert that to cash; that's M5. Hey, have your grandparents left you a trust fund to draw on for a college education, or a secure income, because they loved you but thought you were an idiot? You can borrow on your trust fund and spend the money all at once; that's M6. Do you have wealthy relatives aging fast and going gaga? You can pressure them to bequeath some of their money to you now, M7. Have you got good paper and a color copier? Counterfeit money is M8. Do you possess a kilo of cocaine? That is worth thousands of dollars on the street, M9. Can you get hold of a gun and are you willing to use it? You have M10.
No need for you to sneer at M10 money. The Spaniard came to America for M10 with sword and musket, getting tons of gold in exchange for the Catholic religion. Spain became the richest and most powerful European nation until the rise of the English. Financed by Elizabeth the Great, Sir Francis Drake raided the Spanish galleons, pirating their gold cargoes. He made himself and his Queen rich, and received great honors as a privateer.
If you don't like violent M10, consider M11 which you get with deft fingers, stolen money; or begging money, M12: "Daddy, do you love me?" "Of course, I love you, darling." "Daddy, lend me $20 for the movies tonight." On the street: "Sir, my car is out of gas. Can you spare a few dollars so I can get home?"
Finally, we have OPM, other people's money, or M13. If you can solicit well money from investors, philanthropists, or taxes, you can create piles of M13, a very liquid form of money, easily spent on six-thousand dollar shower curtains, fancy charity balls, fabulous vacations, private jets, and other jaunts.
Even time is money, said Ben Franklin; true if people are working to produce or market goods and services in the time available to them. Forget that dictum if people are chatting around the water cooler, or gossiping with friends instead of working. Fame is money too, and so is notoriety. You can convert it to money by publishing your story, making guest appearances, or endorsing products; so don't knock the paparazzi. Call fame M14. Monica Lewinsky got a million dollars for her book on the fine art of cigar making for Bill Clinton; but Clinton got even more M14 for his memoirs, and so did Dick Nixon, whom we don't have around to kick any more.
Lastly, political or military office and connections are readily convertible to money, M15. Profit in politics is not strictly from graft, although that is the case in many countries, especially in Africa, the Middle East, South America, and Asia. In the U.S., officials earn a modest salary when in service, but after leaving their posts, companies pay them high fees or salaries to manage their affairs, taking advantage of the knowledge and the connections ex-officials possess; ex-officials make excellent lobbyists.
Besides different kinds of money we also have high or low velocities of money. Sometimes money circulates very fast, other times very slowly. When you put cash under your mattress, you take something out of the speed of money. When you spend money right after you get it, then you give it an extra boost in speed, increasing the number of transactions in the economy. People will spend money quickly when money is losing value, as in an inflationary period, thus making inflation worse by effectively boosting the money supply. When consumers become pessimistic about their finances and their jobs, they pull in their horns, spend less, and velocity drops. In effect, any delay by anybody in making a transaction reduces the flow of money and economic activity. A drop in economic activity in a recession tends to feed on itself, because the quantity of money and its velocity both go down. A professor talking about the velocity of money to a young blond at a gathering got this response: "I can understand that," she gushed. "Money simply flies out of my purse."
When the quantity and velocity of money go down in the business cycle, producers lower their prices, stores have fire sales, and consumers go shopping for bargains, boosting the economy again.
With the economy growing, jobs are plentiful, profits and wages go up, people are confident, spending freely. Economic expansion leads to money growth, and money growth leads to more economic expansion; so economic boom times feed on themselves causing a greater boom, an economic bubble. People buy more stocks and property; they borrow more money to buy more assets, and as profits come in, people spend or give to their spouses to spend part of their income. Eventually some people decide it's time to sell assets, locking in their profits, and the stage is set for markets to decline precipitously and for a recession. Now contraction begins again in the money supply and the economy. Hold your breath or start screaming: the roller coaster is going down.
Money going down or up, for some people either case is an opportunity for profit. Money guys place their bets cleverly, perpetually piling up wealth. Inevitably, money accumulates in the hands of a few families in the country, who also hold the power, the fame, and the influence. If a government were to seize everybody's assets, distribute wealth equally to all adults, and leave things alone, the money and power would be back in the hands of the same people in one generation or sooner, so it happened in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That is because the same cleverly acquisitive people will work hard, save, invest cooperate, and deal advantageously; the vast majority of those who get government largess blow their cash on instant gratifications and other idiocies, getting back to where they started financially.
The concentration of money, in the hands of the few, is it good or bad for our nation? It depends on what sort of people the chosen few are. Power and wealth may corrupt, or may enlighten. Great culture has sprung from the hands of the noble rich, guided by philosopher lords, such as those of the Golden Age of Greece or the Italian Renaissance. Sometimes wealth simply leads to crass displays and degradation. "The rich are different from us," said F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was much impressed by great wealth. "Yes," responded Ernest Hemingway with a smile, "the rich have more money."
The rich get richer and the poor, poorer, until the revolution comes and a new government starts soaking the rich with taxes and distributing the proceeds to the poor with cash grants, food stamps, health care, housing, or unemployment benefits. Such a social program does not work, because then successful people move to other countries with their assets and money, the super rich bank in the Bahamas and other tax havens, poor people become lazy and riotous. The middle class is left to shoulder the burden of heavy taxes, becoming discouraged, apathetic, and ready to quit work to join in the handouts. Inflation ensues after productivity has dropped; and the nation, which was once prosperous, becomes impoverished. Hurrah for socialism!
No, dump socialism and let those who earn good money with their efforts, spend it as they wish, levying on them only those taxes necessary for defense, infrastructure, education with training, and policing. Money earned by anybody is spent one way or another and circulates out to those who provide useful services or goods.
A myriad of goods are available to every person willing to make them or sell them to those who possess money, including the inexhaustible resources of human imagination, thus rewarding the smart worker, circulating money, and creating new money or credit. You see, production of goods comes first, then selling and money creation. Thus a society that trains and encourages all the people to produce more goods and better goods will grow and benefit all. The big producers will have an excess of cash which they will invest and re-invest, as long as they save the excess, to build new plants, offices, farms, and R & D facilities. What is not consumed can be exported, earning more wealth for the nation. If people produce instead too many offspring, which they are unable to train well for high-wage jobs, their nation is left with too many young mouths to feed, and hungry mouths are attached to bodies that pick up guns to slaughter others, as is the case in some African, South American, and Middle Eastern countries.
I have been railing here with derision against the poor and poverty itself as a condition of life; yet, I am willing to accept poverty as an ideology, willingly undertaken by some individuals who want to be free to pursue spiritual, scientific, artistic, or philosophical ends. I think of the case of the Greek Cynic and ascetic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, who lived happily in a tub, wanting only to sit in front of his home to enjoy the sunlight, meditating. An admiring Alexander the Great in youth came between Diogenes and the sun and asked the old man what he could do for him. “Stand out of my light,” answered Diogenes.
Another philosopher, and scientist, of ancient Greece, Thales of Miletus lived simply and solved astronomical problems, but I suppose too many people teased him with, “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” So one year around 600 BC, Thales predicted the weather and the harvest for olives to be excellent. Leasing all the olive presses in Miletus for the season, he showed his townspeople he could enrich himself with his intelligence.
The Buddha’s father was a king and a wealthy merchant was the father of St. Francis of Assisi, but their sons donned clothes of beggars and went to the streets to preach their faith.
Vincent van Gogh lived in dire poverty his entire life of 37 years, while creating masterpieces of painting, each traded for many millions of dollars today. In his life, van Gogh managed to sell one piece of art from his prodigious output for a few francs to buy painting supplies.
Van Gogh was Dutch, a people generally very respectful of money, as are the Jews. After so many centuries of being persecuted in Europe where they sought refuge, Jews have learned the value of money for their survival. Highly portable money like silver, gold, diamonds, all were most useful for bribing officials and escaping to America. In the United States, Jews make up about 2% of the population, but they are one third of all millionaires, earning the highest income of any other ethnic group. I say, more power to them: Jews give to charity, support the arts and sciences, and supply major talents in law, medicine, science, and business; and if an alcoholic writer needs a quick loan, he can always find a Jewish pawnbroker nearby to hock his notebook computer for a bottle or two of his favorite escape. Pawnshop loans are expensive, but they don’t compare with loans an unlucky gambler may get from his friendly Mafia loan shark. Loan sharks lend at 10% or more interest (called juice) each week, and if the unfortunate gambler doesn’t pay back the principal when due, he is likely to find one of his legs bending at an impossible angle; thus, both good and evil flow from money.
Like organized crime, capitalism concentrates money or credit in private hands. Capitalism, however, applies this money like stored energy to productive purposes in serving the needs of those able to buy goods. Capital is backed by physical resources available for large projects of production. The pyramid builders of Egypt could not have created these marvelous tourist sights to bury their Pharaohs without the necessary grains from the Nile valley in granaries to feed the workers. Money is a fictional character with the magic of creation only when backed by real stuff like land, oil, energy, food, minerals, etc. Do capitalists exploit the poor workers, paying them meager wages for bare survival, while owners of the money, investors, enrich themselves more with fat profits? No, it is not so in a free society, where workers can go to another company for employment, where companies compete for valuable employees and profits with other businesses, and people can travel freely to the best jobs for which they are trained. Only an autocratic or socialistic government can enslave people by forbidding them to compete and to move from place to place where the opportunities are. The people who save, accumulate, and invest their money in enterprises create the opportunities for employment for those who have not done so.
In this connection, consider the parable of talants or talents, a story told by Jesus, where a master gave to a servant five talents, to another servant two talents, and to a third servant one talent, a large silver or gold coin representing wages for 6,000 days of labor. The servants who got the five and two talents invested the money and returned the talents to their master with interest, but the third servant buried the money in the ground and returned only the one talent to the master. The master severely punished that silly servant. Well, this was a story about spiritual values, but it applies to crass old money too. If a person does not to invest, that person goes to the outer darkness and misery of poverty.
Not so in America where we have the privilege hearing from preachers who praise money to heaven, thanks to our Calvinist traditions. Churches generally support the accumulation of wealth. The faithful contribute more to the church coffers with their tithes. The Mormon Church gets 10% of the earnings from each member, who is often successful in business, in spite of producing a large family, for the growth and glory of the Church. Lay preachers like Napoleon Hill, the success guru from the thirties, declared God wants us to be rich, and we can all be rich by visualizing wealth, seeking our vision with strong desire and persistent action.
Others have pursued the idea that money is evil or unnecessary and should be abolished. This happens in the science fiction series of Star Trek, where money has no value; only information has value. Given the right information, super computers in the Enterprise can synthesize any material: gold, diamonds, gourmet dishes. For some time, people have objected to the production of currency by a central bank, with most money reserves ending up in the coffers of a few powerful men or women. As a substitute to money we have been offered Ithaca Hours, of Ithaca, New York: one Ithaca Hour is worth about $10, the cost of labor for one hour, issued to members who have joined the exchange group. This is a form of local currency, similar to the Freigeld (free money in German) to be used locally, bearing an expiration date like food, so that it is passed on to others promptly. Such money makes some exchanges possible, but a brain surgeon is unlikely to accept it for his services.
Ultimately, everything depends on human ingenuity and labor to give it value; even land, sea, and space must be defended by men and women to protect the riches they hold. Jacob in the Old Testament, son of Isaac, worked for seven years to win the hand of Rachel, his cousin, tending flocks of animals for his uncle Laban. But Laban deceived him and gave him his eldest daughter Leah in marriage. Well, Jacob labored another seven years for Rachel, but in the end he was rewarded with twelve sons from his two wives and two concubines, who sired the twelve Tribes of Israel. Jacob was a hell of a worker, but where did he get all this energy? I am exhausted just reading about it. Those ancient men had powerful seeds, but not so the ancient women; the women were like the earth to be plowed.
I digress; this is a story about money. Most nations like to print their own fiat money, governments exchanging paper for goods, raising the money supply to stimulate the economy or lowering it to curb inflation. For trading among nations the U. S. dollar rules, the world’s reserve currency since WWII; the euro is catching up as of this writing, with more euros in circulation than dollars. Nations can fix the exchange rate for their currency versus the dollar or let the currency float in the money markets. China pegs the yuan low to boost exports, but that causes inflation in China because of the higher cost of imports and the rapid growth of the economy. If you can master out the intricacies of currency exchange, you can become a billionaire, like George Soros, born in 1930 Hungary, as GyÖrgy Schwartz. You can then turn to philanthropy.
The key to success in currency exchange is to believe the opposite of what your government asserts. If officials say the dollar will remain strong, you can be sure it will weaken. Act accordingly.
A currency is strong, going up, or weak, going down in exchanges, depending on the success of the issuing nation in trade with other countries. If we work hard and efficiently, selling more stuff to other countries than they sell to us, the dollar will appreciate. Again, in a free world market, the dollar will fall when we import more than we export, which has been the case for the U.S. for some years now. Wealth has been flowing out of our country to Japan, China, Europe, and the oil producing nations. In theory, as the dollar drops, we should be exporting more to equalize trade, provided we produce things other countries want to buy from us. In turns out, most countries really want our debt and our assets, not our products so much. So, keep on borrowing and buying America.
In America now and in the past, money tended to cluster in certain large cities, not villages. In ancient Greece, that was Athens. In Renaissance Italy, wealth flourished in Florence, Venice, Milan, and Rome. Later on, Midas settled in Amsterdam, Madrid, Vienna. Today, we have major centers of finance in London, New York, Paris, Zurich, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. It is no coincidence that culture flourishes in places of high finance. Money is an essential but not a sufficient ingredient to high culture. Creative people need money to live, survive, and create those things of culture we value greatly which are not necessities for the masses. A milieu of refined people of rank, finance, and good taste, sons and daughters of Pericles, are required to provide the means for cultural growth.
For economic growth in the world, we would do better with one currency instead of many. The benefits for trade and financial stability would be great with money in the hands of a World Reserve Bank, run by a staff of competent, wise, impartial, and expert officials. Some economists argue against a world currency, that it would not allow a nation to raise or lower the money supply as needed for the nation. Yes, and that would be a good thing, freeing money from the manipulations of politicians. Thus the euro was established and has been become valuable and stable over the years, although Italy and other countries complain about its strength. Basically, we have no universal currency, although it makes sense, as we don’t have a world government and peace among nations. It is time for the G8 group, and others, such as China and India, to institute such a currency, let’s call it the talent, to promote free trade further, eliminating any remaining artificial barriers. At this time, the closest thing to universal money is the U.S. dollar, the closest to a world government is the U.S. officialdom, the closest to a universal language is English, and the closest to a universal religion is the Unitarian Church. But we cannot count on the supremacy of the U. S. to continue, challenged as it is by Europe, Russia, China, India, and the Muslim countries.
Vista, February 2008
Language and Evolution
Language and Evolution
Basil Gala, PhD.
(5557 Words)
The Christian bible says "in the beginning was the word, and the word was God." Word is the translation of "logos" in Greek, the language of the Bible used by educated people in the times of Christ, "logos" referring to Jesus. This is a prime example of the importance of language in human life. Recently, researchers in human evolution have found that the development of speech and the speech center in the left hemisphere of the brain played a critical role in the emergence of humans as a distinct species from the common primate ancestor of Homo sapiens and chimpazees. A large vocabulary, much larger than the thirty of so sounds chimps make to communicate, was the beginning of human divergence from the common primate stock. Over a period of about twelve million years pre-humans and true humans expanded their vocabulary to an average of sixty thousand words today. A powerful language was more important to human evolution than walking on two legs (bipedal locomotion), or using hands on tools and weapons. As an organ of nerve cells (neurons) in the back of the brain (the medulla oblongata) grew substantially in size and complexity to handle balance and stability on two legs, as the motor center center grew to allow more adept manipulation of objects, so did the speech center become enlarged and more capable to deal with words. More power with words meant better thinking to plan, to remember, and to communicate, granting a major survival advantage to those possessing it; the genes augmenting this power with words spread quickly in the population. Humans evolved with the use of language at an accelerating pace. Individual minds evolve similarly in childhood and adulthood, in social interactions and formal schooling. Can we make this evolution of mind a partly conscious and controlled procedure? We are beginning to understand much better how language works to make us more effective, and in the near future we will be able to control the process of creating new concepts for our natural language, thus expanding our minds in unimaginable ways.
Language evolves; we see that in children who replay the entire evolution of life from the womb outwards. At about two years of age or so, children begin talking with simple and halting words and phrases. After a few months of baby talk, connections are established in the brain (as they are for walking), and talking usually comes out with a rush, a replay of human verbal evolution. As the child grows into an adult, language becomes more complex and effective, reflecting the evolution of the brain. In old age, language, writing, and brain activity deteriorates back into childhood patterns. Sometimes, language, thought, and behavior degrade before old age; we see evidence of that on walls covered with graffiti, airwaves filled with rap music, and theaters crowded for the violence of films with cartoon superheroes. Overall, however, as long as civilization continues on our planet, language and thought are advancing in effectiveness, nobility, and power. Evolution to more powerful modes of language does not need to come to an end.
Language is made up of words, which are strings of symbols, such as letters together with other special characters. Symbols make it possible for us to communicate better with each other and with ourself, but gestures work well too as you can see if you are watching deaf mutes or Italians. Gestures are symbols too, as are postures. Are symbols necessary so that we may think? Not at a basic level, because we can think with pictures, also configurations of sounds, even of scents, tastes, and tactile sensations. We can guess how prehumans thought before symbolic language emerged. In many cultures the first written words were pictorial, such as the early hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt, which were later stylized, and eventually became brief symbols, similar to what we use today to form our words and sentences. The paintings on the walls of the Altamira caves in Spain, exquisite as they are, were prehistoric expressions of language. Advanced, more complex and effective, thinking requires abstract concepts and their corresponding words, such as justice, science, evolution, computation, history, integration.
What exactly is a concept? A concept is a classification of sense data or other input to the mind into organized groupings so you can respond appropriately for your survival to a challenge from your environment. For example, you may see certain moves by someone which you recognize as threatening and respond by taking defensive measures. You have conceived you are being threatened; classifying the sense data you have received, the concept you have derived is that of threat. Alternately, other moves you see, you may classify as humor or love. Concepts thus defined are similar to Emanuel Kant's categories, a major feature of his philosophy of logic.
I am concerned here with advanced concepts of abstraction, a high-level natural language. In computer science, researchers developed a number of high-level languages to program computers with greater ease, such as FORTRAN, Pascal, and C++. My aim here is not to get strictly technical and discuss languages for calculations, symbol manipulation, and picture processing, but what we have learned from computer linguists can be of some use in understanding natural languages. A natural language is much more extensive and versatile, capable of dealing with a great variety of subjects including feelings, than a computer language limited to just a few hundred words and symbols that put the machine into a few digital operations . English has millions of words, capable of dealing with every thought, sensation, and emotion we can experience; a natural language is constantly changing and expanding in response to new experiences and challenges facing a human population.
Today we are facing such fearsome challenges as we did when as a small band of Homo sapiens we emerged in arid East Africa a hundred thousand years or so ago, challenges which threaten our existence again as a species. I expect if anything can save us now that has to be a new and transcendental way of talking, writing, and thinking. Transcending old ways of dealing with the world and with each other, we reject confrontation, exploitation, and destruction, to greater cooperation among ourselves and with the web of life on our planet. The age-old ways of speaking and thinking worked well when populations were small around the earth, tribes hemmed in by powerful predatory animals and a harsh nature with what appeared unlimited resources: vast forests, deep oceans, and unscalable mountains.
From an orbiting satellite, the Pacific Ocean looks like a pond, and Mount Everest a mere molehill. The forests are burning everywhere to make room for fields and buildings, or being cut down for fuel and lumber. The challenges are: destruction of human habitats, depletion of natural resources, planetary pollution, overpopulation, intractable epidemics, and warfare with ever more powerful weapons. We have to stop doing what we habitually do, and think with new concepts and words, suited to our present predicament.
Words or other symbols refer to things or concepts, which are called referents. Words represent referents; they take the place of referents in communication and in thinking. Using words we can do work in the mind without dealing with the actual things they represent, like mentally traveling on a map instead of the actual terrain, looking at hazards, time constraints, and destinations. Words allow us to organize, plan, command, entertain, motivate ourselves and others, lead, woo, impress, but mainly words allow us to think on an abstract level. Words can also mislead, so conditioned are we to them after many years of using them daily. Say the word lemon, visualize the fruit, and your mouth fills with saliva. Recite your national anthem, and your heart fills with pride, ready to drive you to battle.
What comes first, the word or the concept? Clearly, the concept. First we form concepts, such as pride, pointing to the emotion, then we configure the word or symbol to represent it. Conceiving new concepts is the creative part of language. There are now words for every concept so far conceived by humans. Where do I find new concepts of value? How to I spur the mind to bring forth a new concept of importance?
Such was the concept of science, the scientific method. René Descartes and Francis Bacon conceived the scientific method in the seventeenth century A.D. Two thousand years earlier, in the sixth century B.C., Democritus and Thales did science without formalizing a method for it. A century later, Plato and the Socratic philosophers gained influence with idealism, which overwhelmed early science in Greece. Idealism spread with Christianity and the Romans to all of Europe. The idealists deal with ideals and ideas: words often without referents, without end, without observations, measurements, or experiments.
We know now that when we question Nature with experiments and carefully observe her answers, that is how we arrive at new and useful concepts. We don't need to exclude our own minds as objects of observation and study. Our minds are part of Nature also; we can study our minds with introspection and meditation as the ancient Indian gurus learned to do long ago, making vital discoveries about our spirits. Combining Eastern wisdom from meditation with the practicality of Western science, connecting the immense outer universe with the equally vast inner one, human evolution may reach levels of thought we cannot even imagine today, with our most potent concepts yet to be conceived.
Again, how do we conceive concepts? When I think about a problem on any subject, words and symbols spring to mind which I have not coined. Am I thinking my own ideas or rehashing those that I have read? But if I have a new or unsolved problem and if I come up with a unique solution, then I can coin words to fit the concepts I have discovered in the struggle for the solution. Posing a question is the way to discovery, learning and evolution. Sometimes the question is foisted upon us by nature; it is a natural challenge for survival, as it is imposed on simpler animals and plants, a challenge to which we must respond by changing ourselves to be fit the solution. Bees, ants, and other social insects have hit on the solution to their survival problems; they have stuck to their social devices for millions of years, the queen mother, workers, and warriors, without much change in behavior. Birds build their nests in the same stereotyped way for each species; the cuckoo bird has its own peculiar way of taking care of its young, and so does the wasp planting its eggs in a tarantula. Such animals don't deviate much from their habitual behavior.
Advanced people explore and deviate from what they are accustomed; they keep posing questions to themselves out of curiosity; they do not rest until they have answers or they have died.
Such was Carl Friedrich Gauss, interested in the statistics of disease and death, working for the life insurance fund of the German government. He posed the question: Can we predict how many people will live to what age in a large population of insured individuals? It was important to fix these statistics to determine premiums for policies. Studying this problem Gauss came up with the concept of a frequency distribution, called today Gaussian, commonly known as normal or bell shaped. Pose an important problem, find the answer; if the answer is new and original, you have a concept you can name, or your name becomes a suitable word for it.
How do we produce suitable words? Who were the people who invented the words in Websters dictionary and how did the use of the new words spread in the population, becoming standard English? Many of the words scholars imported from Latin, Greek, and other languages, used them in their books and speeches and gradually the circle of their use expanded among educated people and later to the population at large. This explanation only translates the problem to other countries. How did the Greeks go about about inventing their words? Spoken language predates its written form by many thousands of years. Many words are imitations of natural sounds: murmur, screech, whistle, crash, bang, etc. These phonetic words don't take us very far into the dictionary. I can imagine that some bright fellow, a leader or primitive intellectual of an ancient tribe, woke up one day and got the notion of naming objects not previously named by the tribe. That person picked up a rock and called it such; a piece of wood, the same; then a handful of water. Later the leader talked to fellow tribal members and instructed them using the new words. Everyone imitated the leader as monkeys do today, the new words accepted and their use spreading quickly because they were useful for communication and survival.
Today scientists and engineers do similar feats with language when they observe new phenomena in their researches. Consider the language of organic chemists, describing combinations of atoms in compounds, with words made up by compounding the names of the elements in a molecule or that of physicists explaining the structure of subatomic particles with bosons, mesons, leptons, gravitons, and quarks.
Naming things, such as objects, sensations, even feelings, is not creating abstract concepts. This way we are using concrete words, which are fine in literature, especially in metaphors. We get abstraction when we name classes of things. In this sense the word chair is abstract, unless we are pointing to a particular chair, because it names pieces of furniture with legs and a top on which we sit. Furniture is the genus to which the species chair belongs; furniture includes many other artifacts besides chairs, and is therefore more abstract than the word chair. Furniture in turn is a species in the genus of human artifacts. We can continue this process of naming broader classes of things until we get to the word universe or God, containing everything that exists.
How about imaginary things, which presumably do not exist, such as unicorns and leprechauns? Anything we can imagine does in a sense exist;it becomes part of the universe when we have thought of it, since we are parts of the universe. Certainly this is so when we externalize our imaginings, putting them in some more durable form such as a piece of writing, a painting, sculpture, or any object we make from materials in nature. In our modern world we are constantly living with products of the human imagination, from televisions, cellular phones, computers, millions of artifacts, constantly emerging. We have thus become creators as well as namers of abstract things.
Abstracting is a process of composing a larger entity from smaller elements. This is the case in music, where we have an infinite variety of themes developed from the seven musical notes: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. The song you enjoy so much is simply the composer's abstract thought set to music. Similarly, a beautiful mosaic picture is made up of thousands of small colored pebbles. Seurat painted his sublime canvasses using points of paint, an art called pointilism. Van Gogh created his masterpieces with a few simple strokes of his brush. Hemingway did the same with small, simple words of the English language, yet his effects were very compelling in "The Sun Also Rises," "A Farewell to Arms," and "The Old Man and Sea." Hemingway crafted big effects in his stories with small words.
Words from a natural language like English are like field stones: they have different shapes, colors, materials, sizes; computer words are bricks or cement blocks, manufactured, not grown from living experiences. The author builds a structure with care using natural words, a thing of beauty and meaning, a new abstraction.
The point is: abstraction and creation emerges from putting together simpler elements, called primitives. What enters the composition in this synthesis of elements is the ineffable breath of design which gives it life, a breath from the spirit of the creator, human or divine. Analysis breaks down the design into its basic parts, isolating each part from the other parts, robbing it of vitality. Analysis can be very instructive to the designer, like reverse engineering by imitators, but for the rest of us criticism is decay, devoid of joy, with a bad smell. We are left with elements which amount to almost nothing, ghostlike, like the remains of matter left from supercollider experiments at CERN or Fermilab.
As to the most fundamental elements, the primitives in any composition, what are they and what faith can we place on these elements? In geometry we accept the existence of what we call a point and a line without providing any definitions for these. With the point and the line taken as given, together with a few other such undefined elements and unproven truths called axioms, Euclid build up his entire structure of geometrical theorems. When we analyze anything, eventually we get to precepts and truths we accept on faith. These have been called inborn, or God-given truths. Induction, for example, in logical thought is a mental process common to all humans not mentally impaired.
Take a look at the sequence of numbers: (2,3,4) (3,4,5) (4,5,6). What comes next in the sequence? Any human will use the inborn trait of induction to reply (5,6,7). The most intelligent chimpanzee, although capable of the most incredible feats of temporary memory, will fail this test for induction. A human child will pass it readily.
Besides induction, we naturally accept as valid the mental process of exhaustive search. When we enumerate all possibilities in a problem, and we select one or more to use, we believe we have a valid approach. From this springs the value of truth tables, which we employ extensively in logic and digital design to prove the truth of an expression of variables. We assign a value of true (T)or false (F) to each input or variable, and a value to the output. For example, we define the logical function AND for two inputs (A, B ) by the truth table:
A B A.AND.B
F F F
F T F
T F F
T T T
In other words, we accept that logically the output is true, only when both inputs are true.
Similarly, we accept a double negative as positive. We say, if someone is not dishonest, that person is honest.
Such notions are common sense, the endowment of every normal human being when mature enough, as Plato shows in his Socratic dialogue of "Meno." With simple questions, Socrates guides an illiterate slave boy to prove a non-trivial theorem in geometry.
We can assume that our ability to employ basic precepts, logical or of other kinds, evolved as we evolved as a species, or if we are religious, these precepts were granted to us by our Creator. As an impartial observer in the arguments on religion, I have no doubt that our bodies have evolved together with our primate cousins, but at some points in time factors entered the evolutionary equation for humans from a realm outside ordinary reality. Our minds, not our bodies, are the result of this influence.
We can begin to see now how to grow and expand our minds, seeking new words and concepts: by keeping busy creating, composing, synthesizing; going into analysis only to learn structures as they exist now, then freeing ourselves from old disciplines to build something new with the use of our inborn precepts. In this process we escape from logical, established, thinking and use our right brain to explore problems in a non-linear, wholistic or integrated fashion.
What we prize most in somebody's work is not something done to perfection, following tradition, an old recipe, or formula, valuable as those may be, but something from the spirit of the worker, different as the worker is from others, different, and new, and wonderful.
Yet, observe carefully around you, most of us are content to think as we were taught in family and school with all the well-tested concepts handed down to us through the ages; we live by the habits we acquired in childhood, refusing to change even when these habits of thought and behavior lead us down to perdition. Why is this so? Change is shaky ground for most of us; it is fearful, uncomfortable, even painful. How many of us seek adventure and knowledge with a passion? For an adult, change in established habits is very, very difficult, almost impossible. Yet, the will operates like a rudder on a supertanker. A few people recover for life from addictions, such as alcoholism, overeating, or gambling, somewhere between one to five percent. We are all slaves to our habitual thoughts which may have served us or our ancestors well in the past; we are prisoners inside a steel cage of entrenched concepts.
I too am a prisoner and find it virtually impossible to change my ways, even when I see that I desperately need to do so. I am trapped in a web of concepts, woven for me by others in the past, yet I refuse to accept my situation. I dig tunnels in my prison to escape. I seek the clarity of reason, now and until my end, searching for more efficient concepts. I seek to adapt, to form new ideas and behaviors, slowly, painfully, breaking away from harmful habits of thought and behavior to improve myself.
I want to explore the world of ideas, to find new models for the data available to me, new paradigms, or patterns. I conceive new patterns by focusing, concentrating on the problem I face; concentration may be the main difference between the innovator and the hack. Can you think of anything of importance somebody achieved without possessing great passion? A genius is a smart person who struggles fiercely to achieve, focusing the attention on a subject with a laser light until a meaningful pattern emerges; thus the clever person improves in mind and life.
We improve and evolve into new worlds of thought and language, submerged in a different state of consciousness of deep meditation. Language is a left-brain activity, while mental exploration, creativity, is a right brain activity. It is their combination that leads us to pose new problems and locate their solutions, with the right balance of disciple from our left brain and freedom to dream from our right brain; a balance that also works well for a creative society.
I suspect our ancestors diverged form other apes when they began to meditate: to enter into an alternate state of consciousness, leading to greater awareness, perhaps contacting a source of wisdom much greater than ourselves, and acquiring new concepts doing so.
A new concept is something we see clearly in our minds, a pattern we recognize that we had not sensed previously, a model derived from a collection of input data organized in a meaningful form, to which we give a name. Computers, in spite of their enormous computational powers and memories, are still unable to equal humans in pattern recognition ability, even in apparently simple tasks such character or speech recognition. Programmers keep trying to develop systems to do such functions and to perceive structures in data, but progress is slow in this field. There is a barrier to progress in machine intelligence; we are getting closer to the design of a smart computer, but the difficulty of designing it seems asymptotic, as if God does not yet want us to get to it. Our inborn precepts or truths will not transfer to our machines so far.
Now as to these native, wired-in, precepts and axioms, how can we acquire new and more advanced ones? Our inborn truths are God-given or Nature-given, representing our basic capabilities as human beings. As a male peacock has fine tail feathers, as a song bird has lovely notes, as a seagull has great wings for flying, so us humans possess our basic precepts of certain fundamental facts to guide our reason and feelings. Computers at the machine level can perform a number of operations on switches, turning them off or on, that we represent as 0 or 1. Each computer design is capable of a certain repertoire of such binary manipulations; it cannot exceed its repertoire of what it can do, no matter how sophisticated a high-level language we employ in our programming. Yet, employing operations on 0 and 1 on memory registers, computers can do an enormous lot of activities, which we all experience today in appliances, cell phones, in movie graphics, and the Internet. In 1946 Alan Turing showed that a elementary digital machine with the simplest memory, a stored-program computer, could do any computation imaginable, given good programming and sufficient time. It is the same with humans; although limited in our capabilities by our internal wiring, with good programming we can achieve great things as individuals and as a species.
To do more than we are wired to do, we will need to redesign our brains, which may be possible with the new technologies of bioengineering. Presently we are stuck with our inborn precepts. As flies keep buzzing to get through the glass of a window, so we butt our heads against some problems we cannot solve given our mental equipment.
In the meantime, we have our current powers of analytical (logical) thought, and of meditation, which two powers most of us use too little to achieve much of value in our lives. Excellent treatises are available, from Aristotle to Carnap, on symbolic logic; as for meditation techniques, we have Herbert Benson's "The Relaxation Response," and "The Breakthrough Principle." Dr. Benson was a Harvard medical researcher, but these techniques are available to us in many good sources for tapping our native powers of creativity. Basically, to augment thought we need to sweat out the details for quite a while, observing nature, collecting data, recording, experimenting, measuring--doing good old science almost to exhaustion--then, relaxing with walks, music, baths, etc., until we get our breakthrough to our discovery or invention. If the breakthrough, the main insight to the solution of our problem, does not yet come, we repeat the above.
The above cycle of work can be distributed between different people. For example, much progress in physics is done through the collaboration between experimental physicists and theoreticians, such as Leon M. Lederman at Fermilab and Murray Gell-Mann at Caltech. One collects vast amounts of data with ingenious experiments, and the other studies the accumulation of fairly raw information and models thoughts to fit, providing explanations. Consider the collaboration of Carl Friedrich Gauss in the eighteenth century, cranking out mathematics in Göttingen all his life, with of his contemporary world traveler, measuring guru, Alexander von Humboldt. Together they contributed much to our understanding of magnetism. The gauss is the unit of magnetism.
Similarly, Einstein is credited with many important advances in theoretical physics, which he would not have achieved without the data provided to him by experimenters. Could a mind such as Einstein's think without words, without symbols? Yes, but not very well, very far, or for very long. In his youth Einstein left high school and traveled to Tuscany, Italy, where in the clear light of the country he conceived special relativity. He described those gossamer early notions later in his twenties using the language of mathematics. At the time of his death, his blackboard at Princeton was covered with equations on general relativity, equations still preserved by the Institute of Advanced Studies. Einstein needed to write down his thoughts to make progress and conserve their memory. The story is told of Gauss jumping out of his wedding bed to record an equation that occurred to him while making love to his young wife.
It is clear we need symbols which we manipulate like things in order to advance thoughts to fruitful conclusions. In mathematics we start with simple numbers: not so simple actually, as explained by Gauss in his monumental "Disquisitiones Arithmeticae," which was his doctoral dissertation at twenty years of age. Anyway, somewhere in our human past we started counting things; numbers emerged and the beginning of mathematics. Numbers were a monumental discovery. Chickens cannot count above two. If a hen has lost a number of her chicks to predators, she's still clucking happily if she has at least two left; or maybe she's just stoical. Indians invented the Arabic numerals we use today, including the powerful zero. The ancient Greeks and Romans, in spite of their advances in mathematics, did not use Arabic numerals but letters for calculations, with a blank in place of a zero. We use letters in algebra, an Arabic word, to solve problems with known and unknown numbers. Algebraic equations were a higher level of abstraction. Then René Descartes in the seventeenth century gave us the coordinate system; we could now represent algebraic equations pictorially. The equation y=mx+b, could be shown to be a straight line intersecting the y coordinate at b and with a slope of m. We now had analytic geometry and trigonometry, a still higher level of abstraction in mathematics. Moreover, mathematicians devised a solution for the square root of a negative number, inventing complex numbers, which were given the unfortunate name of imaginary as opposed to the old real numbers.
In the same fruitful seventeenth century, Newton and Leibniz invented calculus independently. Newton was looking for a practical tool to calculate motions, while Leibniz developed calculus from a rigorous mathematics viewpoint. Calculus, which had puzzled the Greeks, including the superlative genius of Archimedes, in the squaring of the circle, pi times r squared, includes the fantastic notions of the infinite and infinitesimal; the number pi could now be calculated to any degree of accuracy, instead of being estimated. Differential equations emerged from calculus, with much more power of abstraction than algebraic equations; scientists could now apply differential equations widely to explain precisely previously intractable scientific phenomena, such as electromagnetism. With differential equations in vector form Maxwell could state the laws of electromagnetism concisely and elegantly, covering a vast array of physical eventualities in such phenomena, which could be investigated by integrating the equations. That's abstraction.
In the twentieth century we saw parallel developments of abstraction in other disciplines: psychology, sociology, economics, and the arts of painting, sculpture, music, and the theater. Progress continued in dealing with random phenomena and the previously intractable problem of probability, which were now placed on a firm footing of mathematical rigor, thanks mainly to French, German, Indian, and Russian thinkers, who discovered fitting axioms and proved theorems now bearing their names.
Again, the point is: we need language growth not only to communicate better with each other, but mainly to think better individually and together with other well-trained minds.
It is said that Nikola Tesla, the genius of alternating currents, could visualize mentally complex electrical machinery in every detail; however, his designs had to be put down on paper to be fabricated and tested. In the award-winning movie, "Amadeus," Mozart is depicted with entire symphonies in his head, later writing down the notes for the music without the smallest error or correction. Were those cases thinking without symbols? No. Mozart and Tesla could retain in the mind large amounts of the symbols in their discipline with the right organization or structure. I suspect Mozart did a lot of rewriting in his head before coming to the right form for a symphony or concerto. Actually, the structure of the symbols made the retention of the information possible for the two creative geniuses, thanks to their superb intellect and training.
Will computers every develop intellects such as Mozart's or Tesla's? Can we program digital machines to organize data and think as humans do? Over forty years ago, I. J. Good, a British mathematician, predicted the development of intelligent machines, which would help us design even more intelligent ones, an evolution resulting in machine super intelligence, surpassing our own by far, by the year two thousand. Arthur C. Clark, a British physicist and science fiction writer, wrote the novel 2001, with HAL, an intelligent computer as the protagonist. At the end of the story, HAL fails, but its astronaut companion grows to a superhuman with the help of an alien power, and returns to earth as a star child. That was advancing evolution with Deus ex machina.
We have seen many advances in digital machines in the past few decades: vast, super fast memories and central processing units, sophisticated programming for personal computers and main frames, and computer communications such as the Internet, all in very small packages; following Moore's Law, this progress continues. We have not seen smart machines, although we do have readers and speech recognizers with a 95-99% accuracy after training. We are seeing more of an integration of human and machine capabilities in many fields, with the human mind augmented by computers. We do much of our fact finding today with the help of Google and other search engines, collecting data from innumerable sites on the Net. We are getting closer to a superhuman-machine entity rather than a separate machine or human super intelligence.
With computer languages becoming ever closer to human ones, we are reaching the point when we will be communicating with our machines much more effectively, integrating our minds and bodies with their circuitry, and starting on the road to evolving as Homo digital.
Basil Gala, PhD.
(5557 Words)
The Christian bible says "in the beginning was the word, and the word was God." Word is the translation of "logos" in Greek, the language of the Bible used by educated people in the times of Christ, "logos" referring to Jesus. This is a prime example of the importance of language in human life. Recently, researchers in human evolution have found that the development of speech and the speech center in the left hemisphere of the brain played a critical role in the emergence of humans as a distinct species from the common primate ancestor of Homo sapiens and chimpazees. A large vocabulary, much larger than the thirty of so sounds chimps make to communicate, was the beginning of human divergence from the common primate stock. Over a period of about twelve million years pre-humans and true humans expanded their vocabulary to an average of sixty thousand words today. A powerful language was more important to human evolution than walking on two legs (bipedal locomotion), or using hands on tools and weapons. As an organ of nerve cells (neurons) in the back of the brain (the medulla oblongata) grew substantially in size and complexity to handle balance and stability on two legs, as the motor center center grew to allow more adept manipulation of objects, so did the speech center become enlarged and more capable to deal with words. More power with words meant better thinking to plan, to remember, and to communicate, granting a major survival advantage to those possessing it; the genes augmenting this power with words spread quickly in the population. Humans evolved with the use of language at an accelerating pace. Individual minds evolve similarly in childhood and adulthood, in social interactions and formal schooling. Can we make this evolution of mind a partly conscious and controlled procedure? We are beginning to understand much better how language works to make us more effective, and in the near future we will be able to control the process of creating new concepts for our natural language, thus expanding our minds in unimaginable ways.
Language evolves; we see that in children who replay the entire evolution of life from the womb outwards. At about two years of age or so, children begin talking with simple and halting words and phrases. After a few months of baby talk, connections are established in the brain (as they are for walking), and talking usually comes out with a rush, a replay of human verbal evolution. As the child grows into an adult, language becomes more complex and effective, reflecting the evolution of the brain. In old age, language, writing, and brain activity deteriorates back into childhood patterns. Sometimes, language, thought, and behavior degrade before old age; we see evidence of that on walls covered with graffiti, airwaves filled with rap music, and theaters crowded for the violence of films with cartoon superheroes. Overall, however, as long as civilization continues on our planet, language and thought are advancing in effectiveness, nobility, and power. Evolution to more powerful modes of language does not need to come to an end.
Language is made up of words, which are strings of symbols, such as letters together with other special characters. Symbols make it possible for us to communicate better with each other and with ourself, but gestures work well too as you can see if you are watching deaf mutes or Italians. Gestures are symbols too, as are postures. Are symbols necessary so that we may think? Not at a basic level, because we can think with pictures, also configurations of sounds, even of scents, tastes, and tactile sensations. We can guess how prehumans thought before symbolic language emerged. In many cultures the first written words were pictorial, such as the early hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt, which were later stylized, and eventually became brief symbols, similar to what we use today to form our words and sentences. The paintings on the walls of the Altamira caves in Spain, exquisite as they are, were prehistoric expressions of language. Advanced, more complex and effective, thinking requires abstract concepts and their corresponding words, such as justice, science, evolution, computation, history, integration.
What exactly is a concept? A concept is a classification of sense data or other input to the mind into organized groupings so you can respond appropriately for your survival to a challenge from your environment. For example, you may see certain moves by someone which you recognize as threatening and respond by taking defensive measures. You have conceived you are being threatened; classifying the sense data you have received, the concept you have derived is that of threat. Alternately, other moves you see, you may classify as humor or love. Concepts thus defined are similar to Emanuel Kant's categories, a major feature of his philosophy of logic.
I am concerned here with advanced concepts of abstraction, a high-level natural language. In computer science, researchers developed a number of high-level languages to program computers with greater ease, such as FORTRAN, Pascal, and C++. My aim here is not to get strictly technical and discuss languages for calculations, symbol manipulation, and picture processing, but what we have learned from computer linguists can be of some use in understanding natural languages. A natural language is much more extensive and versatile, capable of dealing with a great variety of subjects including feelings, than a computer language limited to just a few hundred words and symbols that put the machine into a few digital operations . English has millions of words, capable of dealing with every thought, sensation, and emotion we can experience; a natural language is constantly changing and expanding in response to new experiences and challenges facing a human population.
Today we are facing such fearsome challenges as we did when as a small band of Homo sapiens we emerged in arid East Africa a hundred thousand years or so ago, challenges which threaten our existence again as a species. I expect if anything can save us now that has to be a new and transcendental way of talking, writing, and thinking. Transcending old ways of dealing with the world and with each other, we reject confrontation, exploitation, and destruction, to greater cooperation among ourselves and with the web of life on our planet. The age-old ways of speaking and thinking worked well when populations were small around the earth, tribes hemmed in by powerful predatory animals and a harsh nature with what appeared unlimited resources: vast forests, deep oceans, and unscalable mountains.
From an orbiting satellite, the Pacific Ocean looks like a pond, and Mount Everest a mere molehill. The forests are burning everywhere to make room for fields and buildings, or being cut down for fuel and lumber. The challenges are: destruction of human habitats, depletion of natural resources, planetary pollution, overpopulation, intractable epidemics, and warfare with ever more powerful weapons. We have to stop doing what we habitually do, and think with new concepts and words, suited to our present predicament.
Words or other symbols refer to things or concepts, which are called referents. Words represent referents; they take the place of referents in communication and in thinking. Using words we can do work in the mind without dealing with the actual things they represent, like mentally traveling on a map instead of the actual terrain, looking at hazards, time constraints, and destinations. Words allow us to organize, plan, command, entertain, motivate ourselves and others, lead, woo, impress, but mainly words allow us to think on an abstract level. Words can also mislead, so conditioned are we to them after many years of using them daily. Say the word lemon, visualize the fruit, and your mouth fills with saliva. Recite your national anthem, and your heart fills with pride, ready to drive you to battle.
What comes first, the word or the concept? Clearly, the concept. First we form concepts, such as pride, pointing to the emotion, then we configure the word or symbol to represent it. Conceiving new concepts is the creative part of language. There are now words for every concept so far conceived by humans. Where do I find new concepts of value? How to I spur the mind to bring forth a new concept of importance?
Such was the concept of science, the scientific method. René Descartes and Francis Bacon conceived the scientific method in the seventeenth century A.D. Two thousand years earlier, in the sixth century B.C., Democritus and Thales did science without formalizing a method for it. A century later, Plato and the Socratic philosophers gained influence with idealism, which overwhelmed early science in Greece. Idealism spread with Christianity and the Romans to all of Europe. The idealists deal with ideals and ideas: words often without referents, without end, without observations, measurements, or experiments.
We know now that when we question Nature with experiments and carefully observe her answers, that is how we arrive at new and useful concepts. We don't need to exclude our own minds as objects of observation and study. Our minds are part of Nature also; we can study our minds with introspection and meditation as the ancient Indian gurus learned to do long ago, making vital discoveries about our spirits. Combining Eastern wisdom from meditation with the practicality of Western science, connecting the immense outer universe with the equally vast inner one, human evolution may reach levels of thought we cannot even imagine today, with our most potent concepts yet to be conceived.
Again, how do we conceive concepts? When I think about a problem on any subject, words and symbols spring to mind which I have not coined. Am I thinking my own ideas or rehashing those that I have read? But if I have a new or unsolved problem and if I come up with a unique solution, then I can coin words to fit the concepts I have discovered in the struggle for the solution. Posing a question is the way to discovery, learning and evolution. Sometimes the question is foisted upon us by nature; it is a natural challenge for survival, as it is imposed on simpler animals and plants, a challenge to which we must respond by changing ourselves to be fit the solution. Bees, ants, and other social insects have hit on the solution to their survival problems; they have stuck to their social devices for millions of years, the queen mother, workers, and warriors, without much change in behavior. Birds build their nests in the same stereotyped way for each species; the cuckoo bird has its own peculiar way of taking care of its young, and so does the wasp planting its eggs in a tarantula. Such animals don't deviate much from their habitual behavior.
Advanced people explore and deviate from what they are accustomed; they keep posing questions to themselves out of curiosity; they do not rest until they have answers or they have died.
Such was Carl Friedrich Gauss, interested in the statistics of disease and death, working for the life insurance fund of the German government. He posed the question: Can we predict how many people will live to what age in a large population of insured individuals? It was important to fix these statistics to determine premiums for policies. Studying this problem Gauss came up with the concept of a frequency distribution, called today Gaussian, commonly known as normal or bell shaped. Pose an important problem, find the answer; if the answer is new and original, you have a concept you can name, or your name becomes a suitable word for it.
How do we produce suitable words? Who were the people who invented the words in Websters dictionary and how did the use of the new words spread in the population, becoming standard English? Many of the words scholars imported from Latin, Greek, and other languages, used them in their books and speeches and gradually the circle of their use expanded among educated people and later to the population at large. This explanation only translates the problem to other countries. How did the Greeks go about about inventing their words? Spoken language predates its written form by many thousands of years. Many words are imitations of natural sounds: murmur, screech, whistle, crash, bang, etc. These phonetic words don't take us very far into the dictionary. I can imagine that some bright fellow, a leader or primitive intellectual of an ancient tribe, woke up one day and got the notion of naming objects not previously named by the tribe. That person picked up a rock and called it such; a piece of wood, the same; then a handful of water. Later the leader talked to fellow tribal members and instructed them using the new words. Everyone imitated the leader as monkeys do today, the new words accepted and their use spreading quickly because they were useful for communication and survival.
Today scientists and engineers do similar feats with language when they observe new phenomena in their researches. Consider the language of organic chemists, describing combinations of atoms in compounds, with words made up by compounding the names of the elements in a molecule or that of physicists explaining the structure of subatomic particles with bosons, mesons, leptons, gravitons, and quarks.
Naming things, such as objects, sensations, even feelings, is not creating abstract concepts. This way we are using concrete words, which are fine in literature, especially in metaphors. We get abstraction when we name classes of things. In this sense the word chair is abstract, unless we are pointing to a particular chair, because it names pieces of furniture with legs and a top on which we sit. Furniture is the genus to which the species chair belongs; furniture includes many other artifacts besides chairs, and is therefore more abstract than the word chair. Furniture in turn is a species in the genus of human artifacts. We can continue this process of naming broader classes of things until we get to the word universe or God, containing everything that exists.
How about imaginary things, which presumably do not exist, such as unicorns and leprechauns? Anything we can imagine does in a sense exist;it becomes part of the universe when we have thought of it, since we are parts of the universe. Certainly this is so when we externalize our imaginings, putting them in some more durable form such as a piece of writing, a painting, sculpture, or any object we make from materials in nature. In our modern world we are constantly living with products of the human imagination, from televisions, cellular phones, computers, millions of artifacts, constantly emerging. We have thus become creators as well as namers of abstract things.
Abstracting is a process of composing a larger entity from smaller elements. This is the case in music, where we have an infinite variety of themes developed from the seven musical notes: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. The song you enjoy so much is simply the composer's abstract thought set to music. Similarly, a beautiful mosaic picture is made up of thousands of small colored pebbles. Seurat painted his sublime canvasses using points of paint, an art called pointilism. Van Gogh created his masterpieces with a few simple strokes of his brush. Hemingway did the same with small, simple words of the English language, yet his effects were very compelling in "The Sun Also Rises," "A Farewell to Arms," and "The Old Man and Sea." Hemingway crafted big effects in his stories with small words.
Words from a natural language like English are like field stones: they have different shapes, colors, materials, sizes; computer words are bricks or cement blocks, manufactured, not grown from living experiences. The author builds a structure with care using natural words, a thing of beauty and meaning, a new abstraction.
The point is: abstraction and creation emerges from putting together simpler elements, called primitives. What enters the composition in this synthesis of elements is the ineffable breath of design which gives it life, a breath from the spirit of the creator, human or divine. Analysis breaks down the design into its basic parts, isolating each part from the other parts, robbing it of vitality. Analysis can be very instructive to the designer, like reverse engineering by imitators, but for the rest of us criticism is decay, devoid of joy, with a bad smell. We are left with elements which amount to almost nothing, ghostlike, like the remains of matter left from supercollider experiments at CERN or Fermilab.
As to the most fundamental elements, the primitives in any composition, what are they and what faith can we place on these elements? In geometry we accept the existence of what we call a point and a line without providing any definitions for these. With the point and the line taken as given, together with a few other such undefined elements and unproven truths called axioms, Euclid build up his entire structure of geometrical theorems. When we analyze anything, eventually we get to precepts and truths we accept on faith. These have been called inborn, or God-given truths. Induction, for example, in logical thought is a mental process common to all humans not mentally impaired.
Take a look at the sequence of numbers: (2,3,4) (3,4,5) (4,5,6). What comes next in the sequence? Any human will use the inborn trait of induction to reply (5,6,7). The most intelligent chimpanzee, although capable of the most incredible feats of temporary memory, will fail this test for induction. A human child will pass it readily.
Besides induction, we naturally accept as valid the mental process of exhaustive search. When we enumerate all possibilities in a problem, and we select one or more to use, we believe we have a valid approach. From this springs the value of truth tables, which we employ extensively in logic and digital design to prove the truth of an expression of variables. We assign a value of true (T)or false (F) to each input or variable, and a value to the output. For example, we define the logical function AND for two inputs (A, B ) by the truth table:
A B A.AND.B
F F F
F T F
T F F
T T T
In other words, we accept that logically the output is true, only when both inputs are true.
Similarly, we accept a double negative as positive. We say, if someone is not dishonest, that person is honest.
Such notions are common sense, the endowment of every normal human being when mature enough, as Plato shows in his Socratic dialogue of "Meno." With simple questions, Socrates guides an illiterate slave boy to prove a non-trivial theorem in geometry.
We can assume that our ability to employ basic precepts, logical or of other kinds, evolved as we evolved as a species, or if we are religious, these precepts were granted to us by our Creator. As an impartial observer in the arguments on religion, I have no doubt that our bodies have evolved together with our primate cousins, but at some points in time factors entered the evolutionary equation for humans from a realm outside ordinary reality. Our minds, not our bodies, are the result of this influence.
We can begin to see now how to grow and expand our minds, seeking new words and concepts: by keeping busy creating, composing, synthesizing; going into analysis only to learn structures as they exist now, then freeing ourselves from old disciplines to build something new with the use of our inborn precepts. In this process we escape from logical, established, thinking and use our right brain to explore problems in a non-linear, wholistic or integrated fashion.
What we prize most in somebody's work is not something done to perfection, following tradition, an old recipe, or formula, valuable as those may be, but something from the spirit of the worker, different as the worker is from others, different, and new, and wonderful.
Yet, observe carefully around you, most of us are content to think as we were taught in family and school with all the well-tested concepts handed down to us through the ages; we live by the habits we acquired in childhood, refusing to change even when these habits of thought and behavior lead us down to perdition. Why is this so? Change is shaky ground for most of us; it is fearful, uncomfortable, even painful. How many of us seek adventure and knowledge with a passion? For an adult, change in established habits is very, very difficult, almost impossible. Yet, the will operates like a rudder on a supertanker. A few people recover for life from addictions, such as alcoholism, overeating, or gambling, somewhere between one to five percent. We are all slaves to our habitual thoughts which may have served us or our ancestors well in the past; we are prisoners inside a steel cage of entrenched concepts.
I too am a prisoner and find it virtually impossible to change my ways, even when I see that I desperately need to do so. I am trapped in a web of concepts, woven for me by others in the past, yet I refuse to accept my situation. I dig tunnels in my prison to escape. I seek the clarity of reason, now and until my end, searching for more efficient concepts. I seek to adapt, to form new ideas and behaviors, slowly, painfully, breaking away from harmful habits of thought and behavior to improve myself.
I want to explore the world of ideas, to find new models for the data available to me, new paradigms, or patterns. I conceive new patterns by focusing, concentrating on the problem I face; concentration may be the main difference between the innovator and the hack. Can you think of anything of importance somebody achieved without possessing great passion? A genius is a smart person who struggles fiercely to achieve, focusing the attention on a subject with a laser light until a meaningful pattern emerges; thus the clever person improves in mind and life.
We improve and evolve into new worlds of thought and language, submerged in a different state of consciousness of deep meditation. Language is a left-brain activity, while mental exploration, creativity, is a right brain activity. It is their combination that leads us to pose new problems and locate their solutions, with the right balance of disciple from our left brain and freedom to dream from our right brain; a balance that also works well for a creative society.
I suspect our ancestors diverged form other apes when they began to meditate: to enter into an alternate state of consciousness, leading to greater awareness, perhaps contacting a source of wisdom much greater than ourselves, and acquiring new concepts doing so.
A new concept is something we see clearly in our minds, a pattern we recognize that we had not sensed previously, a model derived from a collection of input data organized in a meaningful form, to which we give a name. Computers, in spite of their enormous computational powers and memories, are still unable to equal humans in pattern recognition ability, even in apparently simple tasks such character or speech recognition. Programmers keep trying to develop systems to do such functions and to perceive structures in data, but progress is slow in this field. There is a barrier to progress in machine intelligence; we are getting closer to the design of a smart computer, but the difficulty of designing it seems asymptotic, as if God does not yet want us to get to it. Our inborn precepts or truths will not transfer to our machines so far.
Now as to these native, wired-in, precepts and axioms, how can we acquire new and more advanced ones? Our inborn truths are God-given or Nature-given, representing our basic capabilities as human beings. As a male peacock has fine tail feathers, as a song bird has lovely notes, as a seagull has great wings for flying, so us humans possess our basic precepts of certain fundamental facts to guide our reason and feelings. Computers at the machine level can perform a number of operations on switches, turning them off or on, that we represent as 0 or 1. Each computer design is capable of a certain repertoire of such binary manipulations; it cannot exceed its repertoire of what it can do, no matter how sophisticated a high-level language we employ in our programming. Yet, employing operations on 0 and 1 on memory registers, computers can do an enormous lot of activities, which we all experience today in appliances, cell phones, in movie graphics, and the Internet. In 1946 Alan Turing showed that a elementary digital machine with the simplest memory, a stored-program computer, could do any computation imaginable, given good programming and sufficient time. It is the same with humans; although limited in our capabilities by our internal wiring, with good programming we can achieve great things as individuals and as a species.
To do more than we are wired to do, we will need to redesign our brains, which may be possible with the new technologies of bioengineering. Presently we are stuck with our inborn precepts. As flies keep buzzing to get through the glass of a window, so we butt our heads against some problems we cannot solve given our mental equipment.
In the meantime, we have our current powers of analytical (logical) thought, and of meditation, which two powers most of us use too little to achieve much of value in our lives. Excellent treatises are available, from Aristotle to Carnap, on symbolic logic; as for meditation techniques, we have Herbert Benson's "The Relaxation Response," and "The Breakthrough Principle." Dr. Benson was a Harvard medical researcher, but these techniques are available to us in many good sources for tapping our native powers of creativity. Basically, to augment thought we need to sweat out the details for quite a while, observing nature, collecting data, recording, experimenting, measuring--doing good old science almost to exhaustion--then, relaxing with walks, music, baths, etc., until we get our breakthrough to our discovery or invention. If the breakthrough, the main insight to the solution of our problem, does not yet come, we repeat the above.
The above cycle of work can be distributed between different people. For example, much progress in physics is done through the collaboration between experimental physicists and theoreticians, such as Leon M. Lederman at Fermilab and Murray Gell-Mann at Caltech. One collects vast amounts of data with ingenious experiments, and the other studies the accumulation of fairly raw information and models thoughts to fit, providing explanations. Consider the collaboration of Carl Friedrich Gauss in the eighteenth century, cranking out mathematics in Göttingen all his life, with of his contemporary world traveler, measuring guru, Alexander von Humboldt. Together they contributed much to our understanding of magnetism. The gauss is the unit of magnetism.
Similarly, Einstein is credited with many important advances in theoretical physics, which he would not have achieved without the data provided to him by experimenters. Could a mind such as Einstein's think without words, without symbols? Yes, but not very well, very far, or for very long. In his youth Einstein left high school and traveled to Tuscany, Italy, where in the clear light of the country he conceived special relativity. He described those gossamer early notions later in his twenties using the language of mathematics. At the time of his death, his blackboard at Princeton was covered with equations on general relativity, equations still preserved by the Institute of Advanced Studies. Einstein needed to write down his thoughts to make progress and conserve their memory. The story is told of Gauss jumping out of his wedding bed to record an equation that occurred to him while making love to his young wife.
It is clear we need symbols which we manipulate like things in order to advance thoughts to fruitful conclusions. In mathematics we start with simple numbers: not so simple actually, as explained by Gauss in his monumental "Disquisitiones Arithmeticae," which was his doctoral dissertation at twenty years of age. Anyway, somewhere in our human past we started counting things; numbers emerged and the beginning of mathematics. Numbers were a monumental discovery. Chickens cannot count above two. If a hen has lost a number of her chicks to predators, she's still clucking happily if she has at least two left; or maybe she's just stoical. Indians invented the Arabic numerals we use today, including the powerful zero. The ancient Greeks and Romans, in spite of their advances in mathematics, did not use Arabic numerals but letters for calculations, with a blank in place of a zero. We use letters in algebra, an Arabic word, to solve problems with known and unknown numbers. Algebraic equations were a higher level of abstraction. Then René Descartes in the seventeenth century gave us the coordinate system; we could now represent algebraic equations pictorially. The equation y=mx+b, could be shown to be a straight line intersecting the y coordinate at b and with a slope of m. We now had analytic geometry and trigonometry, a still higher level of abstraction in mathematics. Moreover, mathematicians devised a solution for the square root of a negative number, inventing complex numbers, which were given the unfortunate name of imaginary as opposed to the old real numbers.
In the same fruitful seventeenth century, Newton and Leibniz invented calculus independently. Newton was looking for a practical tool to calculate motions, while Leibniz developed calculus from a rigorous mathematics viewpoint. Calculus, which had puzzled the Greeks, including the superlative genius of Archimedes, in the squaring of the circle, pi times r squared, includes the fantastic notions of the infinite and infinitesimal; the number pi could now be calculated to any degree of accuracy, instead of being estimated. Differential equations emerged from calculus, with much more power of abstraction than algebraic equations; scientists could now apply differential equations widely to explain precisely previously intractable scientific phenomena, such as electromagnetism. With differential equations in vector form Maxwell could state the laws of electromagnetism concisely and elegantly, covering a vast array of physical eventualities in such phenomena, which could be investigated by integrating the equations. That's abstraction.
In the twentieth century we saw parallel developments of abstraction in other disciplines: psychology, sociology, economics, and the arts of painting, sculpture, music, and the theater. Progress continued in dealing with random phenomena and the previously intractable problem of probability, which were now placed on a firm footing of mathematical rigor, thanks mainly to French, German, Indian, and Russian thinkers, who discovered fitting axioms and proved theorems now bearing their names.
Again, the point is: we need language growth not only to communicate better with each other, but mainly to think better individually and together with other well-trained minds.
It is said that Nikola Tesla, the genius of alternating currents, could visualize mentally complex electrical machinery in every detail; however, his designs had to be put down on paper to be fabricated and tested. In the award-winning movie, "Amadeus," Mozart is depicted with entire symphonies in his head, later writing down the notes for the music without the smallest error or correction. Were those cases thinking without symbols? No. Mozart and Tesla could retain in the mind large amounts of the symbols in their discipline with the right organization or structure. I suspect Mozart did a lot of rewriting in his head before coming to the right form for a symphony or concerto. Actually, the structure of the symbols made the retention of the information possible for the two creative geniuses, thanks to their superb intellect and training.
Will computers every develop intellects such as Mozart's or Tesla's? Can we program digital machines to organize data and think as humans do? Over forty years ago, I. J. Good, a British mathematician, predicted the development of intelligent machines, which would help us design even more intelligent ones, an evolution resulting in machine super intelligence, surpassing our own by far, by the year two thousand. Arthur C. Clark, a British physicist and science fiction writer, wrote the novel 2001, with HAL, an intelligent computer as the protagonist. At the end of the story, HAL fails, but its astronaut companion grows to a superhuman with the help of an alien power, and returns to earth as a star child. That was advancing evolution with Deus ex machina.
We have seen many advances in digital machines in the past few decades: vast, super fast memories and central processing units, sophisticated programming for personal computers and main frames, and computer communications such as the Internet, all in very small packages; following Moore's Law, this progress continues. We have not seen smart machines, although we do have readers and speech recognizers with a 95-99% accuracy after training. We are seeing more of an integration of human and machine capabilities in many fields, with the human mind augmented by computers. We do much of our fact finding today with the help of Google and other search engines, collecting data from innumerable sites on the Net. We are getting closer to a superhuman-machine entity rather than a separate machine or human super intelligence.
With computer languages becoming ever closer to human ones, we are reaching the point when we will be communicating with our machines much more effectively, integrating our minds and bodies with their circuitry, and starting on the road to evolving as Homo digital.
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