Harry the Human: December 2024

Saturday, December 14, 2024

Statement of disavowal, by Harry the Human

Sorry, readers, when I turned my back on Robert's and D.L.'s trip to Bhutan I should not have handed over my blog so completely to Robert, as I did in the following post (Big Brains), where he concludes that humans are complicated, not smart, and speculates that we will end up as a head on a desk with spindly arms and fingers for a keyboard. He is a gila monster, after all, and it is rude of him to pronounce on the future evolution of humans, which he maintains will not be as glorious as gilas'. In fact he apparently believes they will be quite sad and miserly in comparison. How would he know? We humans are the ones who created our problem, and we're the ones with the brains to figure it out!

I hope. That's the purpose anyway of this lonely blog, to call out to my fellow evolving humans that the time is now to set the future. It is not in a science-fiction story or paper about times to come. It is happening at this moment.

Robert knows this but doesn't feel it. His species is evolving at their normal pace: they've been in roughly the same form for 20 million years. We're about to change form completely within 20 years. No wonder Robert is pessimistic about us- although we have lots of understanding, we have no plan, no overall blueprint. And our evolutionary jam is nowhere to be found in our political discussion. It will be a combination of free-for-all and covert action. Yuck!

Robert, if I may address you and yours for a moment, although you have your challenges, the universe has never squeezed down on you as it does on us. You've been able to stand on your own four feet, look around and spit in approval. How can you challenge beings you do not understand? You can still be my friend (if that's what you are) but you will need to start your own blog- you're done with mine. Let's see what the market is for telepathic gila monsters.

I had intended to end here, but Robert as usual is monitoring my thoughts and has begged me to let him add a short addendum. I have obliged if only to demonstrate the inherent generosity of my species.

Yours Truly, Harry the Human

Addendum by Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster

Greetings readers, sorry about my buddy Harry's foul mood this morning. I will of course oblige him by not pre-empting any more lengthy cross-species reveries on his blog, but let me just note that my pessimism about the human species is not unfounded and is shared by many if not most of your kind.

Harry, no doubt you'd like me to admit that there are hopes of intelligent re-emergence in Homo sapiens, however fleeting. Sure, I'll admit it, as soon as I see it. I suppose you think you're part of the fleeting hope? Ha! I'd smirk and sneer except gila monsters can't do that. Have a nice evolution, Harry!

Yours, Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster

Addendum from Harry the Human

Wow, that was mean, Robert! It will be a cold day in Darwinism before you're back on my blog! Come on folks, help me prove this desert lizard wrong about us!

All the best, Harry the Human

Big brains, by Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster

Harry asked me to continue to guest-author his blog. Since my trip with D.L. to Bhutan, Harry has not felt like writing. He says, "Things write themselves." Even though I don't know what he means, I disagree. I feel, for instance, that if I don't post my new theory about why the human brain is big, it will be lost in the desert void, a not uncommon outcome for this banished reptile.

My theory was sparked by an interesting article in NewScientist magazine (which I read telepathically from Harry's online edition) titled, "Why did humans evolve big brains? A new idea bodes ill for our future" (12/14/24, by Colin Barras), which starts by reviewing the common assumption that human brains are big because they're smart. The assumption becomes questionable as Barras considers various contradicting facts, e.g., the Neanderthal brain was bigger than a modern human's; Einstein's brain was just average size, etc. Then of course there's the fact that even though the human brain averages 1,350 cubic centimeters, while the typical gila monster's cranial cavity averages a mere 65 cm of the good stuff, I'm clearly a smart aleck, in the good sense (if any).

Barras goes through the latest fossil evidence on the fluctuating size of hominid brains through the millennia. It turns out that about 10,000 years ago, just about the time large civilizations were forming, human brain size dipped from 1,500 cm to about 1,350. One theory about the shrinkage is that it occurred not in spite of our getting smarter, but because of it, so that writing, for instance, "allowed people to store some of their accrued knowledge externally instead of committing it to memory, and thus the need for brain cells decreased." Barras conjectures that something similar may happen to humanity because of AI. Worst case scenario (or best, depending how you look at it): Humans evolve into a stationary head with spindly arms and ten fingers to tap a keyboard. This is my bet.

After going through current theories about human brain size, Barras concludes that there is no firm evidence either that bigger size is a survival advantage, or that it denotes more intelligence. He describes one theory speculating that the increase in size was an "accident" caused by the rise of meat eating, which gave humans so much more energy than vegetarianism that the energy "had to go somewhere," and ended up in brain size for want of a better idea for its use.

Perhaps it's because of my perspective from outside your species that I'm considering another possible reason your brains are big. I've noticed that humans, especially as they leave early childhood, are exceptionally convoluted in their relations with each other. An almost totally artificial construct is presented when people communicate. This is the case whether you talk to someone you care about or love, or a total stranger, or someone you dislike. You are able to project your "real feelings," but they have to go through a maze of translation, caused, I think, by the layers of personality glued together in your brains by a cruel evolution, in which never ending life-and-death change has made clear to you again and again that you have the wrong personality and mentality, that you need to turn into someone else, someone maybe who kills animals and eats them, or who ends 300,000 years of inter-tribal hate and war to forget your tribes and gather in cities.

The obsolete brain patterns are not deleted or rewritten after installation of a new mindset, but are "repressed," "sublimated," shoved into your "subconscious," like new computer code replacing old code that gets stored away. Why didn't you just delete your old mentalities? Maybe you didn't have time. Or maybe you're evolving into a species where the repressed mindsets, like the conquered demons obliged to support Buddha, send you their thoughts and perceptions, forming your behavior, indirectly governing you. That would make the governing part of your brain the subconscious, not the conscious, because your conscious mind is not aware of the other mentalities from your previous existences; you have no memory of who you were. It's the subconscious that is aware.

The human brain, then, is big, not because it's smart, but because it's complicated. The question becomes, "Is it good to be complicated?"

Yours ever, Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster

Wednesday, December 11, 2024

Bye Bhutan!

Hey folks! Here I am, the only gila monster in Bangkok International Airport, concealed in the carry-on of my human buddy, Doug, using his one-hour free wi fi to give my final report on this journey. What a journey it was!

My original purpose was to convey greetings from the god of Funeral Peak in Death Valley, InsertHere, to his cousin, Tab B, in the Bhutanese Himalayas (keep reading for more on the unusual names), but it turned out they didn't have much to say to each other. I did, however, make a new Bhutanese friend, who turns out to be a distant relative of us gila monsters: a tokay gecko. I met him in the mountains near the famed Tiger's Nest monastery. I'll try to spell his name in English letters: Ke-ke-ack-a-grrrrp. He explained to me that "tokay" is an onomatopoetic representation of their mating call. We had a congenial discussion about the contrast between us, as my kind doesn't have a mating call; we go by smell. I secrete a pheromone that suggests to female gilas that a needy male is near, while, if I'm lucky, I'll detect a pheromone suggesting that a female finds my message interesting. This is the wonder of travel: Meeting other cultures and discovering how for all our differences, we aren't so different after all!

The one-hour free wi fi is closing.

All the best, your world traveling reptile, Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster.

Sunday, December 8, 2024

MIndfulness City...mindfulness world

Doug and I rarely co-author, but we were in such alignment on Mindfulness City that we collaborated on this piece. Best, Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster

The proposed Mindfulness City in the south of Bhutan, endorsed by the king of Bhutan and attracting worldwide financial interest, achieves credibility from its connection to Bhutan. The promotional material describes a city incorporating Bhutan's historic and continuing "green," ecologically sound design and philosophy touted, though missing from the increasingly chaotic and dysfunctional major cities of the world. There is buy-in from international quarters, but if Mindfulness City were proposed for any other location, its emphasis on IT and vast sums of investment could inspire much skepticism and sarcastic characterization as a billionaire's paradise. We might have joined in such skepticism, but as we near the end of a ten-day tour of Bhutan, we find it hard not to feel that Mindfulness City deserves a chance. Bhutan is unlike any other country in the world. Nestled in the Himalayas between India and China, and subject to potential political pressure and conflict on a par with the tectonic forces that squeeze the Himalayas towards the heavens, the culture and, dare we say, the spirits of the land have evolved to deal with often uncaring forces of the cosmos.

One feels as well a surprising unity here between working people and all levels of management, up to the king. There is also a unity of religion, through the mystical thought of Buddhism. Within that one religion are a variety of perspectives. Yesterday we meditated on a statue of "Wealth Buddha," seated in deep meditation, a cluster of currency in his hand. Making money is not "bad" in this morality, necessarily.

That's the catch. Mindfulness City will be at the creative edge of the AI and biotech mediated re-creation of the human being, who is about to be "improved." Some of the improvement will be long sought and wonderful, for instance the end of diseases that have tormented humanity. Perhaps "old age" will be improved, developing from its current reality as a state of isolation and slow death, to something worth staying alive for.

But what will the human mind and human nature become? It looks like the species will be able to decide those too. If our brave new world will be like Aldous Huxley's 1931 classic, Brave New World, where the corporate/state's goal is to churn out artificially produced, genetically uniform, uncomplaining workers, while confining remnants of old style humanity (the "savages") to concentration camps- that's one thing. But people could also re-create themselves into wise, unwarlike, loving and positive beings. Making a profit on that would not be essentially bad. Wealth Buddha expresses one of our natures. But there are other Buddhas, other natures.