Mitch's Blog

How Things Work: Labor can become more powerful if unions organize the 90% of American workers who don’t belong. Sucking up to Republicans is not the answer.

Making the Republican Party less hostile to the interests of the working class is a nice goal but if you think that this will be the result of electing a fascist who tried the steal the last election and who famously stiffs people who work for him and who is an egomaniac and who has never supported the electoral agenda of unions and who lies constantly and who is running on a racist platform of demonizing immigrants—you are stupid. You are a patsy if you think this.

The Nature of Consciousness:

Let’s suppose you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could for example have the power to dream in one night 75 years worth of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say ‘Well, that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise. Let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don’t know what it’s going to be.’ And you would dig that, and come out of it and say ‘That was a close shave, now wasn’t it?’ Then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further gambles as to what you would dream, and finally you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of the life that you are actually living today.

Watts also brings to life the cliched observation that we are not separate from the universe. We are a part of it. We did not come into the world when we were born, we are agglomerations of atoms that existed for billions of years before we were born and will continue to exist for billions more after we die. The distinction between “self” and “other” is an illusion.

just as a magnet polarizes itself at north and south, but it’s all one magnet, so experience polarizes itself as self and other, but it’s all one.

Our individuality was implicit in the universe from the time it began.

It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.

…

So don’t differentiate yourself and stand off and say ‘I am a living organism in a world made of a lot of dead junk, rocks and stuff.’ It all goes together. Those rocks are just as much you as your fingernails. You need rocks. What are you going to stand on?

Watts also has a theory of consciousness I quite like: Our bodies do almost everything without consciousness. Consciousness is not involved in circulating blood, digesting food, or breathing (most of the time). Even when we consciously decide to walk or move our hand, consciousness is not involved in the micro-movements. I’m sitting here typing just now, but I’m not consciously making my fingers move. I just look at the screen, and I perceive the words appearing on the screen directly from my brain.

Consciousness evolved to handle the small fraction of tasks that our bodies can’t do without consciousness. We think our consciousness is our entire selves — some philosophers say you are not your body — but that’s wrong. Consciousness is only part of our selves.

Obama Says Biden Has to Rethink His Candidacy [politicalwire.com]

Also on politicalwire.com:

President Joe Biden’s political world is collapsing. Top allies have either publicly or privately called on him to step aside. Major donations have fallen off a cliff. Grassroots fundraising is not keeping up with the demands of a campaign that needs to aggressively scale up three months before the presidential election. Members of his own re-election effort have already declared he has no path to victory.

networkworld.com:

“Our opening position is skepticism," stated Dr. Joe Altepeter, the DARPA program manager of the project, in a blog about QBI. “Specifically, skepticism that a fully fault-tolerant quantum computer with a sufficient number of logical qubits can ever be built.”

”We will walk into the room and say, ‘We’re pretty sure whatever you’re doing is not going to work.’ I will bring a small army of scientists and engineers, we will listen to your evidence, and we will double and triple check using our own analysis," Altepeter wrote. “And if we’re convinced the technology you’re developing checks out and you’re onto something big, we’ll tell the rest of government and become a strong advocate for your approach.”