T3h Blog

“What is our love?  In the midst of pain and pleasure, we know it is exclusive, personal: my wife, my children, my country, my God.  We know it as a flame in the midst of smoke, we know it through jealousy, we know it through domination, we know it through posession, we know it through loss when the other is gone.  So we know love as a sensation, do we not?  When we say we love, we know jealous, we know fear, we know anxiety.  When you say you love someone, all that is implied: envy, the desire to posess, the desire to own, to dominate, the fear of loss, and so on.  All this we call love, and we do not know love without fear, without envy, without posession; we merely verbalize that state of love which is without fear; we call it impersonal, pure, divine or God knows what else, but the fact is that we are jealous, we are dominating, possessive.  We shall know that state of love only when jealousy, envy, possessiveness, domination, come to an end; and as long as we possess, we shall never love.”

A passage from On Love and Loneliness, a compilation of some of J. Krishnamurti’s talks on the topic.

It’s easy enough to say, but more difficult to truly embrace.  I have been thinking a fair bit about “open” relationships lately.  I’m a pretty simple, honestly closed-minded person when it comes to dating.  I think it has caused a lot of problems for me, for exactly the reasons K describes.  I don’t fully understand a difference between open relationships and polyamory.  This idea of posession as a component of relationship is a source of great conflict.  It’s a necessary component for easing fear of loss, though – for a general feeling of safety.  That’s a hard thing to let go of.  I see a lot of value in getting rid of the idea of posession, but I also have a really hard time getting rid of the idea of committing to one person.  Can committing be independent of posession?  Is committing only another way of seeking the same security?

It goes without saying that I am overthinking this, but why not?

” So we have made of love a thing of the mind.  The mind becomes the instrument of love, and the mind is only sensation.  Thought is the reaction of memory to sensation.  Without the symbol, the word, the image, there is no memory, there is no thought.  We know the sensation of so-called love, and we cling to that, and when it fails we want some other expression of that same sensation.  So the more we cultivate sensation, the more we cultivate so-called knowledge – which is merely memory – the less there is of love.
As long as we are seeking love, there must be a self-enclosing process.  Love implies vulnerability, love implies communion, and there can be no communion, no vulnerability, as long as there is the self-enclosing process of thought.  The very process of thought is fear, and how can there be communion with another when there is fear, when we use thought as a means for further stimulation?
There can be love only when you understand the whole process of the mind.  Love is not of the mind, and you cannot think about love.  When you say, ‘I want love’, you are thinking about it, you are longing for it, which is a sensation, a means to an end.  Therefore it is not love that you want, but stimulation; you want a means through which you can fulfill yourself, whether it be a person, a job, or a particular excitement, and so on.  Surely, that is not love … Love is a state of being, and in that state, the ‘me’, with its identifications, anxieties, and possessions, is absent.”

I’ve been at a conference in New Mexico since last Tuesday, and I’ve had lots of interesting encounters and discussions.  One today was really frustrating though, so I’m writing about it.  I met a seemingly brilliant man who has come up with a new way to reconstruct 3D models from 2D projections.  He does it very quickly and with fewer projections than I thought possible, and with very good results.  He asked me what I was doing, after I gave him some details on GPU programming.  I don’t really have a well-defined plan yet, but I think I’d like to make it easier and more accessible for anyone to do these 3D reconstructions.  There are a number of programs, but most of them are variously counterintuitive, incomplete, poorly documented, buggy, etc.  I would like to create a framework for doing the image processing and reconstruction, and do it in such a modular way that it would be easy for anyone else to add to it in the future.  The best (non-commercial) program that I know of is IMOD, but it is not modular this way.

Well, this guy has developed a fairly complete package for all the steps of reconstruction, but he’s keeping it under wraps.  The way that he wants it to work is for people to send him data (2D images), and he’ll reply with their 3D model.  That’s a black box.  I hate black boxes.  They can’t be trusted, especially in science.  If you don’t know how someone is doing something, then their result can’t be trusted.  I don’t care how good it looks or how well it matches with the 2D data.  Open Source software is the obvious opposite of this, but I don’t think that everything has to be open source.  It should, however, be completely clear what a program is doing, to ensure that it is scientifically valid.  He did present a poster, and he vaguely details his methodology, but he intends to keep the detailed workings secret.

On the other hand, if everything was open source, I’m convinced that progress would be much faster.  There would be so much less duplication of work.  America’s economic model is obviously not compatible with everyone working together, and I don’t know of any other economy that would be totally compatible.  It is a pipe dream, but it sounds nice.  In this particular example, if everyone would work together, rather than 15 different labs all creating their own software, then perhaps one or two truly high-quality software packages could have been developed by now.  I don’t pretend to know how you’d split up funding or even put in a proposal for that sort of thing, but it seems like a more logical solution to a problem that we all face, and a problem that is far more general than 3D reconstruction software.  Linux has proven a lot of things possible, and we’ll see over the course of the next 10-20 years if my ideas of open development speeding beyond closed source actually come true.

I was surprised to see condoms being sold in the local law bookstore, which doubles as a convenience store.  I was more surprised by Trojan’s new marketing theme: “Evolve – use a condom every time.”  How are people supposed to evolve using a condom every time?  Doesn’t evolution sort of imply reproduction?

*Warning* Rant. Probably offensive. Expletive free!

Today I did intellectual battle with an anti-abortion demonstrator. I was mostly civil, except when he was especially boneheaded. There are just too many cliche’d ideas that those people use. He was holding this enormous (3.5′x5′ or so) poster of an aborted fetus, arranged in the most disgusting way possible – head mutilated, midsection flayed, giblets strewn about. I approached him and said “are you from a religious organization?” He wouldn’t answer that. My point was to get at his motivation for being there. He asked me what that had to do with anything. I said religious people have a different definition of when something is “alive.” He argued, correctly, that I was wrong. What was a more accurate thing to say is that religious people have a different definition for when a developing fetus is considered a human being. So, we meandered into religion…

“(He points toward the building) Does that just come into existence by itself?”
Obviously not. It’s a human creation.
“What about that tree?”
Yup, it does. Evolution. Buildings are not natural creations. They are a human idea built for a human purpose. There is no architectural natural selection. Anyway, his point (and a common argument to many religious demonstrators I’ve talked to) is that creation is so complex that it had to be created by some intelligent agent. I don’t buy it – there is no proof. I hate religion not because I am anti-God, but because religion is a cop-out. It’s believing what other people have told you, yet you have no evidence for it other than the fact that lots of other people have been following it for some time. If you “feel” God, how are you sure that it’s Him, and not just a strange nervous system phenomenon? The brain is capable of more than we give it credit for, and certainly more than we understand.

He asked me what I believed in – Nothing. Then he brought up another tired argument – “you can’t believe in nothing, if you did you wouldn’t do anything at all, and you’d wither in one spot. Do you take an airplane ride believing that you’ll make it to where you want to go?” Of course. There’s a big difference in my mind between things that directly affect my life (things I trust in), and things that don’t (religious beliefs, my quest for social justice). I trust in things that are required for me to live. I trust my food is safe to eat. I trust that the ground will not collapse before me as I walk to class. Furthermore, these are things that are backed by 24 years of personal experience as being safe, and by many more than that for everyone else. God is not such a requisite belief. My quest for social justice is also not requisite, but it is part of my identification with greater humanity as a whole. What part of life does belief in God actually affect? Here we came to the next topic: morals.

Morals do not come from religion. They are not God’s plan. They are logical extensions and developments from people living in community. Morals are natural laws, but they are passed down in communities through generations, and not necessarily ingrained into our genetics. Society cannot exist without morals, and the only reason society needs religion or government is to enforce the morals on those without the consideration of community or of greater humanity (unfortunately, I think most people fall into this category). He kept on arguing that without law, there would be nothing stopping anyone from killing anyone else. How about animals, he said. Animals kill each other. Sure, but do they kill their den-mates? Do they kill their pack? You must consider pack animals for this, because morals are a product of and a necessity for community. My argument is that with any reflection at all, one becomes aware that everything falls apart without the natural law. Not many people would kill each other without laws because it’s not productive. It doesn’t take society (or any individual) anywhere for long. Every so often, people kill others because of resources, possessions, wronged relatives, etc. This totally destroys the community – paranoia arises and the tendency to generalize and classify people as threats runs wild. Until people recover their trust that everyone is following the rules (morals, natural law), there is less community, in the sense of people participating in society outside their homes. If there were anarchy, there would be no community. I think it is like communism – it’s a good idea in principle, but scale and human greed prevent it from succeeding. Just because we have law to enforce the rules and religion to remind people of them does not mean that the morals originated in either. Is religion anything more than “best practice” for some extended period of time, with the threat of some higher power to intimidate and influence people? I suppose it is also mental support in rough times for people who can’t get enough support from friends/family, or can’t muster the strength to solve their problem alone. I don’t disapprove of that, but I’ll save any further thought on that for another day.

Religion for morals, religion for explaining complexity – both are an unwillingness to question, to genuinely seek truth. I don’t give a rat’s ass about abortion. I just wish people wouldn’t hold disgusting signs up right outside the cafeteria. It’s not like I belch in church when the priest is breaking the bread.

It’s such a hard thing to let go.  I retain so many situations in memory, with such great acrimony and some intent for revenge in most cases.  It can be so easily blamed on human nature – self preservation and all that.  Nevertheless, I feel both compelled to overcome that nature, and yet completely overwhelmed by it.

Here’s a bit of speculation from conversation with a friend today. She’s a bit younger than me, but is experiencing much of the same stuff I did earlier in life – I like to be with people, and I have a great time when I am. However, I am terrible at initiating any of that contact. What’s worse is that without that contact, I get paranoid that friends are abandoning me. It’s a very vicious degenerative loop. I’ve tried pretty hard lately to get better at it, and it’s getting easier, but still awkward. I find it interesting that the capability to initiate social contact is definitely distinct from ability to interact with others, and I’m curious how many other people have issues initiating like I do.