Process philosophy, quantum mechanics and quantum computing

 

I'm taking a break from feeling despair about the US budget bill giving billions of dollars to ICE and building of prisons in Florida and beyond that are essentially being advertised as concentration camps, and enjoying this interview of physicist Jacob Barandes by Curt Jaimungal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEK4-XtMwro

 

I've been interested in this question about how consciousness and experience can be fit into a common framework with materialism and what we know from physics. I'm in a reading group with two philosophy professors from CU, reading Henri Bergson's "Matter and Memory". I've also been interested in Eugene Gendlin's books such as "A Process Model" and "Experience and the Creation of Meaning". Gendlin's philosophy isn't well known and it's incredibly hard to read, but it's quite profound and may provide a language for integrating experience and physics. Bergson frames the problem as finding a middle ground between idealism and materialism and he locates the solution in terms of having a more sophisticated concept of time, together with taking memory into account. I'm interested in how this may connect to Barandes' formulation of quantum mechanics based around "indivisible processes" that break the Markov condition and include non-trivial memory. 

 

Bergson is also difficult to read, though he was actually super famous during his life. His lecture in New York caused the first traffic jam! Another exciting connection to Bergson for me, personally, is that my great grandfather, Herman Bernstein corresponded with Bergson and an interview is presented in "With Master Minds".

 

I'm also interested to read Alfred North Whitehead who might be seen as a bridge between Bergson and Gendlin in this "process philosophy" direction.

 

At the same time, I've been trying to figure out what my next job will be. I'm still thinking of Europe as a possibility, but I'm focusing on Colorado right now. I wanted to stay in the synchrotron light sources, but don't see how I can do that without moving. I've recently been looking into options to work in the field of quantum computation. There's a company nearby called Atom Computing as well as Oxford Ionics, Quantinuum and a few others. I talked with someone from Atom Computing who told me they currently have machines they sell with ~1000 qubits. They are made of Ytterbium atoms moved around by optical tweezers and arbitrary states of entanglement can be created by bringing two atoms close to each other and hitting the two with a laser that excites an electron to a high energy level.

 

It might be fun to work in quantum computing and continue to read this stuff about consciousness and physics.

 

Anyway, I have a few contacts, but still no job. I'm trying to take it slowly and find something meaningful that will also pay the bills. But the state of the US continues to be extremely worrisome.

Liberty, antisemitism, authoritarianism

 

NPR says that the government will monitor immigrant social media for signs of antisemitism.

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/09/g-s1-59149/immigrants-social-media-antisemitism-dhs

I do not accept this trading of our liberties for supposed increased safety for Jewish people. America has been a very hospitable place to Judaism, in my view due to a robust pluralistic society. Transforming away from democracy towards dictatorship does not increase security. One group gets targeted at a time in an autocracy, and the Jews will end up targeted as well as immigrants, and other minorities that are starting to be targeted, with legal frameworks for protection deteriorating.

My great uncle David Bernstein was the president of a commission tasked with celebrating 300 years of the Jewish people in the US in 1954-55. This inspires me to think more broadly about the Jewish people beyond the context of Israel, i.e. in the diaspora. I still don't quite know what to think about Israel. I've never been there and never felt very connected to it. I do know it's an important ritual aspect of Judaism and the Levant is indeed the origin place for the Jews (probably emerging and differentiating from the Canaanites, as far as I have understood.)

 

https://www.jta.org/archive/jews-to-celebrate-300th-anniversary-of-their-settlement-in-u-s

https://www.jta.org/archive/david-bernstein-to-direct-jewish-tercentenary-celebration

 

I want peace in the middle east. I've been wary of reading too much about the Israel-Palestine conflict since it seems like such a no-win situation. Some criticize this attitude as supporting ethnic cleansing. That may be a valid interpretation of what's going on, though I do also feel support for Israel as an imperfect supporter of the Jewish people, born out of a conflicted Zionism (a conflicted term) tied up in complex geopolitics in 1948 and the holocaust. One touch point for me was the book "The Lemon Tree", a true story about the complexity of a friendship between a Jew and a Palestinian. This direction of seeking common ground and reconciliation is where I put my support. The Palestinian nation may be new, coming out of the broader Arab population with mostly Islamic foundations, and they don't have the same length of history as the Jewish people with their several thousands of years. And, just as I don't support the Netanyahu government of Israel, Hamas is a brutal organization, poorly reflecting aspirations for a Palestinian people. But it is a time in the world where we need all the tools we can to solve our problems. The Jewish experience with history and continuity and traditions of memory (such as Passover), should be used generously to support other peoples and not used aggressively. When the Tibetan people were exiled, the Dalai Lama convened a group of Jewish leaders to seek advice on how to maintain culture in exile. I'd like to see Jewish culture and tradition continue to be used in such helpful ways such that we can all live together and respect the multiplicity of stories making up our world today, at such a time of transformation, in particular.

A good series of videos explaining the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict is Dr. Henry Abramson's "Origins of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5poopqMOd5o

 

 

I'm inspired to keep thinking about Jewish history as one thread amongst the many threads of world history. This was a painting I did a few years back when I was reading about Jewish history at the time. These issues are so complicated, but I believe there is a great richness in the Jewish tradition and I want to hold on to that, while also affirming my beliefs in broader human rights- something I've come to understand as consistent and supported by Judaism and many Jewish thinkers through the centuries.

Town hall meeting during dangerous times

Town hall meeting at Monarch High School in Louisville today with Colorado Representative Joe Neguse and Senator Michael Bennet.

They didn't seem to have that concrete of a plan for how we get out of this mess, but it felt great to be in a packed auditorium with thoughtful, enthusiastic people concerned about where our country is going. There was a feeling that at least so far, things are not falling apart at a local level.

 

And Neguse and Bennet were very aware that we are not in normal times. They seemed to really get the danger of the moment and were engaged and willing to listen to try to do what they can. I appreciated Bennet's historical perspective in which he said that he didn't actually think this was the worst moment in American democracy. He encouraged everyone to get involved, reminding us that "there is nothing in democracy that is self executing." Neguse's message regarding what we can do to make a difference is to try to make sure that everyone who is badly impacted by Trump's policies tells their story. He said that many of the executive orders have been walked back after push back and outcry from the public.

 

One of the best aspects (that I also experienced in Denver yesterday) is the conversations in line, and while waiting in the bleachers. There just seems to be palpable relief to talk to other people about this and not feel alone in the fear of what Trump is trying to do. Neguse reminded us that Trump's strategy of "flooding the zone" is supposed to make us feel helpless and to give up. Events like this pierce through that feeling of hopelessness that Fascism requires to succeed.

 

Kudos to Neguse and Bennet for doing these events, in contrast to the many Republicans who are hiding from their constituents. Neguse told us that he did several town halls in strongly Republican districts and got a big turn out with a lot of engagement. He seemed hopeful that at some point some Republicans may feel concerned about their election possibilities and do something. Of course, so far this doesn't seem to have happened, and Trump has been remarkably successful at cultivating a cult of personality amongst the Republicans.

Electron beams, stochastic processes and quantum mechanics

As the US government is taken over by Musk, Fascism solidifies and plans are carried out to destroy government infrastructure and our world-class science as well as undermine civil rights. Meanwhile I'm stuck inside, w/ a minor cold (snow and low temperatures in Colorado). I'm trying to get an application done for Denver University physics department by Saturday. I didn't succeed with the CU Boulder application, which was disappointing, though not so surprising. There are also some open positions at Colorado School of Mines I may apply for. Of course, the political changes make all of this a lot more uncertain.

Meanwhile, I'm reading a lot about stochastic processes to go back to my PhD thesis and try to give a clearer formulation of intrabeam scattering and synchrotron radiation for spin depolarization in high energy electron storage rings. I'm reading books and papers on stochastic differential equations: white noise, Ito calculus, Wiener process, Fokker Planck equation, etc.

I've also been trying to understand Jacob Barandes' "Stochastic Quantum Correspondence"  https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10778
It gives a mapping between a quantum system with a Hilbert space, Hamiltonian and unitary maps, and a general stochastic process with transition probabilities. If the stochastic matrix factorizes at a given time, then you get classical behavior, if not you get quantum behavior (so-called divisible/indivisible processes). There are still interpretational questions about what types of things are actually going through this process, and Barandes is agnostic on the ontology. Still, a lot of difficult questions, like measurement, local causality, etc. are given easier, less murky explanations. I still think there may be some connection to consciousness, but the discussion is shifted and it feels more solvable. I'm appreciative of Barandes bringing this question into a more fruitful and deep conversation with philosophy.

Some additional commentary and possible critique on Barandes' work I've been trying to understand:
https://coexactly.github.io/blog/posts/stochastic-quantum/

Since I don't have a job for now, I may as well try to dig deep in various topics. Shoring up my understandings of stochastic processes and quantum mechanics is something I've long wanted to do. Of course, the dangerous developments of our government can take up a lot of my attention. I'm trying to not let that take over.

I'm hoping this material may help me with my research statement in my application. They want someone to support a program on quantum materials and information science, and this stuff, together with my experience with synchrotron light sources, beamline modeling and machine learning could make a strong application. I put a lot of time into the climate science research statement for CU, but this material may be less of a stretch for the committee, and maybe gives me a better chance to succeed, even though I was excited to try to move ahead on the climate science front.

American Identity

 

I'm watching the Star Trek: Next Generation episode "Birthright" about Worf finding a group of Klingons and Romulons who have learned to live together. Worf brings the Klingon kids their stories and traditions and this disrupts the balance with the Romulons.

 

What I wonder is how new stories and identities are created. Losing history and tradition isn't the answer, but one must also create new traditions.

 

I think about what the American identity is. I think we are being over-run by a limited, small idea of American identity right now.

 

How do we braid the threads of tradition together to form an American identity that can hold us together, but deny no one's history? The attempt to say that whiteness and Christianity is the American identity, is too cheap, too crude, and too disrespectful of so many people's histories. Jewish history must be part of what it is to be American as well as Islamic, Chinese, European, South American, and all other histories and ethnicities that make up the American people.

 

Multi-culturalism is part of the answer, but we also need a stronger answer about what it means to be an American. How else do we all feel a commonality with which we can work together?

 

Probably more reconciliation and reparations are necessary. The native American and African American histories and identities have been disrespected. My intuition is that part of what brings us to this moment of break-down is our failure to find a just integration of all our histories in the US.

What kind of resistance for American Totalitarianism?

 A lot of quotes by Hannah Arendt have been going around in my online circles in the last few days. (Here's some essays on Arendt by one of my favorite writers on technology criticism, Michael Sacasas: https://thefrailestthing.com/tag/hannah-arendt/)

 

Arendt was one of the great chroniclers of Totalitarianism, through Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and after their downfall. When I think about what is happening in the US, the parallels are very strong, and I think it likely that the lessons learned from fascism and totalitarianism in the past will be very useful in dealing with what is to come.

 

At the same time, when I think about what I know of those who resisted during those times, the story feels so dire and my imagination shuts down. I'm more inspired by the history of civil rights, resistance to the Vietnam war and all the other progressive causes that have been so hard won in the US. There is a dramatic attempt to shut them all down and reverse all of that progress. How do we tap into this history of the US and move forward with courage and pride? We have to think about what we love about the US. If we don't fight for it, it will be taken away, faster than we can imagine. I think one needs to fight out of love, and not out of fear. That's what I'm working with right now. The fear is easy to find, right there on the surface. The love may be more ellusive, but it is also there, and deeper down and more sustainable.

An awful election: reflections

 

Well, another day has passed, and it still seems like Trump won the election. I hate this. I'm not sure I've really understood why people voted for this wanna-be dictator. The most resonant point to me that I've heard is that the US wasn't ready to elect a competent, effective woman president. And so we elected a monstrous man instead. This explanation, mixed with a fractured media environment (TV networks + social media) that could be gamed by bad actors gives the start of an explanation for this awful result.

I've often felt through my life that I would end up involved in some kind of non-violent resistance movement. So here we are. What will it look like? Let's hope this setback leads us forward to create a climate and justice movement of the scale needed to face the new time on this planet we are up against.

 

An idea comes up as I think about how to move forward. I've been reading "The Process Model" by Eugene Gendlin, the creator of the psychological technique of focusing. It's a terribly abstract book, extremely frustrating at times, but also with a large scope of trying to create another way of thinking that includes life and consciousness and first person perspective and pushes back against the Cartesian mind-body split. It fights back against reductionism by starting with fully functioning processes rather than trying to build them up from their parts. Gendlin next introduces the concept of a stoppage in which something prevents the process from moving forward (e.g. a lack of food means the feeding-energy gathering process can't move forward). Out of this stoppage, the process is able to change and evolve. Trump's election is a kind of stoppage in our political process. How can we respond creatively to encompass a larger perspective that moves our world forward?

 

A soft snow fell on us yesterday here in Colorado. Here's a plum tree, its green, yellow and orange leaves dusted with snow. This world is too beautiful to give up on.

 

Who inspires you during this time? I've looked to Gandhi and MLK as leaders of non-violent resistance. Who else can we look to for guidance as we find our way forward through this next challenge?

More clarity on the limits of reductionism

 

I've been really enjoying Erik Hoel's book "The world behind the world". (https://www.simonandschuster.com/.../Erik-Hoel/9781982159382)

 

Spending so many years on particle accelerators and synchrotron light sources, I started to think about the x-ray experiments that are done at these facilities. They are an important part of looking at and understanding the world at an atomic scale. For example, a large percentage of protein structures have been determined by x-ray diffraction experiments at synchrotron light sources.

One of the primary tools of science is reductionism, which seeks to look at smaller and smaller scales in order to explain: understanding by breaking something down to smaller parts. While it's certainly extremely valuable, it also has its limits, and feeds into what John Vervaeke calls "The meaning crisis", one manifestation of which is the idea that we "are nothing but a collection of atoms", or perhaps nothing but molecules, or perhaps nothing but quarks, electrons and photon excitations within the standard model in a quantum field theory framework. In high school, I remember reading Dawkins' "Selfish Gene" and getting quite depressed about this view of ourselves as only truly real, or interesting on the level of DNA/RNA.

 

I've long been interested in arguments showing the limits of this kind of thinking. Hoel's work is really helpful in this respect. I have more to learn, but one very concrete result is in terms of "causal emergence" (see https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.01854 )

(I'm also motivated to get back to the writings of the philosopher Nancy Cartwright, who talks about the limits of the language of physics in her books such as "The Dappled World" and "How the Laws of Physics Lie")

 

Hoel shows that under a wide range of concepts of causality, that one actually gains causal power when one goes up to larger scales. This relates to multiple realizability (e.g. how our bodies are replaced by new matter, but our identity remains, or the Ship of Theseus which is slowly replaced part by part). As biological systems evolve, there is a pressure to create large scale causal systems that are robust to changing randomness and complexity at the micro-scale. (It's nice to see Judea Pearl's work on causation referenced as well. I really loved "The Book of Why", which Josip recommended.)

 

I also learned a lot from this talk by Vervaeke (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vazO36OnGKI) in which he gives arguments towards a Neo-platonist ontology. He mentions Hoel's work here. This moves us beyond a purely materialist way of thinking, and makes room for transcendence and spirituality.

Further, the arguments in Hoel's work, show why "The selfish gene" picture is limited: there are causal structures at many different scales. And most of the human world that we care about exists at a larger scale than our genes. Our friendships and commitments, our intellectual pursuits and our everyday existence in our bodies is not on the level of DNA and does indeed have causal efficacy.

 

Anyway, this is another one of my directions that I'm really appreciating having more free time to explore!

Continuity between places

 As I start to think about what I may do next, I come back to the idea that I don't want to leave behind what I've done, either work-wise or community-wise.

I heard about a job opening in Berkeley and I think about moving there. At the same time, I've been really appreciating and getting deeper into my cohousing community here in Colorado. And I appreciate my art studio and the developing community through that.

I guess if I did move back to the bay area, I'd probably look for cohousing there and for an art community there as well.

Transitions

 I'm watching the last season of Battlestar Galactica today. It feels like an appropriate story to accompany a difficult time in human history and a difficult in my life. The crew has to start over again so many times. Even though I was ready for a change, it doesn't mean it's easy. My transition after Grenoble was definitely difficult. That was 8 years, and now I've been through another close to 8 years. I put a lot into my work at RadiaSoft and it's not so clear whether much of it will continue on. Like my years in France, a long investment. I've looked for continuity in life and it's often been elusive.

The very nature of humanity is questioned again and again. And our relationship with technology is centered.

I'm worried about the upcoming election. Are people really confused enough to elect Donald Trump? And I'm worried about climate change. Will humanity find a way to come together to address this problem, or will we put our head in the sand?

I'm glad I'll have some time now to sit with all this before figuring out what to do next.

My dad's life

 

Peter Nash was born in Astoria, New York in 1938. His parents Dorothy and Akos (both of Jewish heritage though not particularly religious) and his brother Larry moved to LA around 1942, (4 years old) living in Los Feliz on Myra Avenue. His father, a medical doctor from Hungary (born in a town called Poklostelek, near what is today Oradea, Romania), met his mom, Dorothy in 1929 in Tours, France.

 

In 1957, (age 19) he went to Reed College for 2 years, (along with two good friends from LA, Jon Appleton and Tommy Rosin) planning to be a doctor, but he ended up really enjoying and thriving in his humanities courses and having a harder time in his science and math classes. He went to Europe for a year to figure out what he wanted, trying to be a writer in Marseille and traveling around other parts of France, and taking a trip from London to Israel by bus with his then girlfriend, Gail Rosin Wread. 

 

Back in the US, he went to San Francisco State U. and got better grades in science classes so that he could attend medical school at USC. He did an internship in San Francisco and lived in Berkeley and Oakland at the time, meeting my mom at folk dancing in Berkeley.

 

He participated in the civil rights movement in 1965, (age 27) attending rallies in Selma, Alabama and Bogalusa, Louisiana, and had a gun pulled on him. 

 

He was a conscientious objector for the Vietnam war and went to jail for 3 days for this.

 

He married my mom around 1968 and Andrew (River) was born in 1971. They traveled to Yap in 1972 and then returned to Santa Cruz to live in Bonny Doon. I was born in 1976 and Rocky (Elijah) was born in 1977. They divorced in 1979 and my Dad married Judy, a nurse practitioner of Armenian heritage that same year. He and Judy ran Cedar Medical Clinic together for 25 years or so before leaving Santa Cruz to move to Petrolia. He continued some work as a doctor in Garberville, but transitioned to retirement and to writing of poetry. Peter and Judy lived in Petrolia until around 2017 when they moved to Mendocino and Aptos, where they have lived since.

Liminal time

 

I was feeling pretty out of it this morning. Getting back to Colorado in the midst of saying goodbye to my dad and after 2+ weeks off work and recovering from Covid, I just felt like nothing fit.

Yesterday I had a talk with a neighbor at Nyland, Bob, who often has insightful things to say about the community. He said that Nyland was designed to exist in a kind of liminal realm between disconnection and total unified following of an ideology. Some find it frustrating because they want to convince the others to follow the same approach.

 

Whether or not that is an accurate description of Nyland, the word "liminal" stuck with me, and after spending the morning sleeping longer than usual, watching "The Iron Giant" and generally feeling frustrated with my life, I let that word sink in. I'm in a kind of liminal time. And perhaps this is where the world is as well. I feel like we've entered the anthropocene era where we need to be responsible in a larger sense for the world. We can no longer have the luxury of imagining an "out there" where we can throw garbage to, where can leave people(s) behind to, etc. We need to have more comprehensive approaches to both nature and culture.

 

One of the last things my Dad said to me was an encouragement to find an entirely different kind of work. It's understandable, since I've often complained to him and others. I've often found the world of particle accelerators to be too small, too disconnected from the real problems of the world. And it can be too big at the same time: so many facilities, so many research problems to work on. And my company spreads itself thin at times and I can get put on projects I'm not so interested in and feel little sense of coherence. So this morning, I was again feeling the need to leave it all behind.

 

I'm sitting in my art studio again and feeling better about everything. I'm not going to leave it all behind. I like applying relativity theory to charged particles. I like understanding partial coherence of x-rays. I like finding humanistic approaches to integrate new methods of neural networks and Bayesian optimization to improve beamline functioning. And I like learning about x-ray and neutron scattering experiments that map out the tiny structures of our world. I can read about philosophy and climate in my spare time and perhaps at some point these will become bigger parts of my life.

 

I've gotten to where I am today by not leaving things behind. I've sat in liminal spaces and worked with them until they became more concrete. I can help build my community at Nyland as well as connect with Fairfield, Iowa and the TM movement. I can keep a good relationship with my younger brother even if he needs to separate himself from some of the family and I can keep trying to find an authentic relationship with my step-mom even if I expect to never fully succeed. And I can love my Dad while also not taking his advice.

 

I'm not sure this all hangs together except that accepting that one is in an in-between time does feel helpful. I've tried to not throw people or parts of myself away and to develop artistic and analytical tools to work with what I've been given. It sometimes feels like an impossible place to live, but it's also the place that a lot of the world finds itself in now. Trying to adjust our systems to prevent climate change, species loss and pollution. Israel and Palestine working off of completely different assumptions with poor leaders trying to impose overly simplistic solutions through violence. So we need to keep finding ways to work with what we actually have and find a peaceful attitude towards ourselves and the world from which to move forward.

thoughts on Israel/Palestine

 

I still don't really know what's going on in Israel/Palestine, but I do take these concerns that there is genocidal intent against the Palestinians seriously.

https://www.ohchr.org/.../gaza-un-experts-call...

 

In this thorny situation with a long history of conflict there is bound to be anger and frustration on both sides. 

 

It's obviously a very incendiary charge against the Israeli government and some of the Israelis, who were formed out of a long history of attempted genocide against the Jewish people. And indeed, there is now growing anti-semitism which raises the specter of that genocidal intent against the Jewish people that has resurfaced so many times through history generally based on prejudices and false stories about a people that often have had to live in diaspora on the boundaries of other societies.

 

But growing up with the daughter of survivors of the Armenian genocide and having some of my father's family killed in the holocaust in Hungary, I have some idea of what inter-generational trauma looks like. And my mom's family also were formed out of pogroms and anti-semitism in Bessarabia and then Canada.

 

So I feel an obligation to prevent this from happening again, wherever and to whomever it happens. My obligation is to look for truth and not look through the lens of prejudice and call out misinformation when I see it.

Balloons

 

Today started out (8am) with the second installment of the Week (https://www.theweek.ooo/) discussion about the state of the world. We saw the video which talked about the capitalistic attitude (More is Always Better) that got us to these disasters: massive species loss, out of control pollution and global warming.

Then I went to karate, learning how to get out of grabs and holds of all sorts. In the middle of the afternoon, I joined my mom on a Zoom call with some Jewish prayers. Finally, this evening was a birthday party at Nyland. Puzzles, costumes, karaoke (I sang a Pogues song) and the start of a conversation with one of the global climate model software engineers at NCAR. 

 

A little bit of a hodgepodge of a day, but still I suppose it's nice to start filling out my life a bit more. Karate and yoga...climate science and particle accelerators, Jewish prayer and the Pogues. Sometimes life feels like a bunch of balloons all going in different directions, and I need to hold onto them all and I don't feel like there's enough of me to inhabit this center.

 

Work also feels a bit disconnected. Not much progress on the neutron scattering data analysis. A little progress on getting a Genesis model for the TESSA undulator at the FAST accelerator. This should also help for modeling LCLS and European XFEL. I do need to learn some more about free electron lasers...

Life's complexity

 I've been waking up at 4am recently, feeling stressed out. So many different threads in life and the world and it's hard to see how they will turn out. Getting to know people at Nyland and to understand the complex organization. The difficulties in the world- war and climate change and people not getting along with each other. And my complex job, working with a lot of different organizations, trying to do something meaningful, to help with the technology of particle accelerators at the same time as to understand the kinds of experiments done with x-rays and neutrons to understand the atomic structure of materials and elementary excitations of matter. Sometimes I feel like I'm pretty good at managing complexity and pulling different pieces together into something that makes sense, and sometimes I feel like it's all too much for me. I suppose painting has always been a kind of practice for this aspect of life. How do we pull together the pieces of this world that seem much more fragmented than any one person can manage?

 

During these times, I often find myself watching the first few episodes of Season 7 of Deep Space 9, where the Bajoran prophets have been attacked by the Pah Wraiths, Ducat has killed Jadzia and captain Sisko is visiting his father, trying to figure out what to do next. I love these two episodes, because they follow three completely different plot lines, that all end up resolving and weaving together in a beautiful way. Sisko meets Ezri Dax and tries to find the orb of the emissary with his father and son, Worf goes on a mission to fight a battle to get Jadzia into Stovokor, and Kira faces off against the Romulans to protest a military build up on the Bajoran moon of Durna. It gives me inspiration during these complicated times to keep trying to follow what I'm doing with integrity, with the hope that the threads of my life (and other world developments larger than me) may come together in some integrative form.

Being Mortal

 

I've been really appreciating listening to an audiobook of "Being Mortal", by Atul Gawande, recommended by a childhood friend, responding to my last post about my dad, growing older, and end of life conditions and choices.

 

For a long time, I've not paid a lot of attention to the (western/scientific) medical perspective, thinking religion and spirituality have more to offer us in terms of staying healthy (while at the same time, as a physicist knowing very well the power and coherence of scientific tools and perspective). Getting older myself, however, I know that I will have to use medicine more often. With my dad a medical doctor and my mom interested in alternative medicine such as Ayurveda and spiritual techniques such as meditation, I've often wondered how to find common ground between these perspectives and technologies. What I see is that some of the alternative medical approaches and spiritual techniques take the whole person into account more than breaking us down into individual parts or separate systems to be healed. But the Western medical tradition based on modern science has a plethora of powerful tools for staving off catastrophic illness and extending our lives.

 

"Being Mortal" is written from the perspective of a surgeon who has dealt with many end of life scenarios and started to question how we think about meaning of life, particular during these dire times. He's not someone who is giving up his profession, but he is doubting whether the medical profession should be the primary force deciding the options we should have, particularly later in life. He writes about his own father's journey with cancer and how the questions the two of them as doctors asked their patients became a lot less abstract when it was Gawande's own father's life at stake.

 

This book feels like a bridge for me, encouraging us to take advantage of all the life and health extending technologies medicine has to offer, but also to remember there are deeper aspects of life and meaning than just staying alive for as long as possible. How do we think about the whole arcs of our lives?

I recently spent a fair amount of time watching youtube videos from a cognitive scientist named John Vervaeke, particularly a 50 part series called "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" that went through all of western history and talks about how we have arrived at what he calls the meaning crisis. It really spoke to me, because he wants to use all the sciences that make up cognitive science to give a more full view of what it is to be human and where religion and spirituality fit in. He also uses the work of a fair number of philosophers, bringing their careful work to bear on the real problems we face as human beings living our complex lives. (Part of his definition of cognitive science involves the use of philsophy to combine the different disciplines by which the mind and human cognition are studied and understood.) Too often when science and humanities are combined, one of them is given a weak, shallow presentation. Vervaeke also uses tools and language of artificial intelligence to talk about intelligence, rationality and wisdom, going back to the Greeks, Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus to ground the discussion using the foundations of the very grammar we use. (Finally my Reed College education where science and humanities were both given equal weights really helps me out.)

 

Being a physicist, I had a hard time answering such questions about meaning in life, yet at the same time, a lot of new age spirituality centers around physics, (often somewhat fringe/borderline stuff such as the multiverse and extra dimensions as well as the more obscure aspects of quantum mechanics such as the EPR experiment) and I've long struggled to find some kind of perspective that is true to the science but doesn't disregard human meaning and gives a richer account of life and our inner worlds.

 

I've also been reading "Religion in an age of Science" by Ian Barbour who gives a framework for how science and religion relate to each other. This helps me integrate the thread I've been following about my Jewish heritage, history of Judaism, and how Jewish religion and spirituality can be relevant to us today. On this line, I've really enjoyed a youtube channel called "Seekers of Unity" that try to find commonality in all the traditions while being well grounded in the Jewish tradition.

 

Overall, these pieces start to fit together: how we can take the medical perspective and technologies and allow them to do what they are good at, but also keep them in their place and not allow them to answer questions about meaning in life and even a lot of aspects of quality of life. The book by Gawande supplies an important piece of this for me. 

 

I've felt for awhile that I haven't had a very coherent picture of what a complete life is about, and this can lead to existential dread and depression. Bringing some of our different traditions together starts to feel like it forms a more solid base. We also need such a base to work together as a people politically and to think about the future of the planet, confronting climate change, species loss and other hugely difficult issues of the Anthropocene era we are entering.

 

I still have plenty of questions, but it seems like an important time to rethink some foundations while not throwing away the bulk of our traditions and systems of knowledge. Finding a middle path here will probably be something I continue to engage in for the rest of my life.

Growing older

 

My dad's been in and out of the hospital recently with some issue with his immune system and blood I have a hard time understanding called Thrombocytopenia. This means he has low platelet count.

My step-mom Judy has been managing all of his medical care and I know this is a really big job for her. Being someone's sole caretaker must be a huge amount of work. My mom did this for my step-father, Bill.

I'd like to contribute in some way, but haven't had a very close relationship with my dad and not always the easiest relationship with my step-mom. So I mostly learn about it second hand and talk with my dad when I have a chance.

 

I've really enjoyed over the years learning about my family history, collecting documents and being a sort of family historian. I've thought of trying to put together some kind of life history document for my dad, since his memory has also been getting worse in recent years. He feels like his memory is worse, but mostly what I notice is that he finds it harder to put sentences together. Words don't come to him very easily. This must be particularly challenging for him, since he is an empathetic person, able to relate to many people, which served him well as a much beloved doctor. And following his retirement from medicine he became a poet, publishing several small books of poetry and winning a number of awards. So losing his language ability must be very frustrating for him.

 

Getting older isn't easy and our society is not well set up for it. Our families are spread out and so the caretaking often ends up falling on just one person, such as a spouse, or having to put elders into residence homes of varying quality of care. And when it comes to death and dying, we hide it away, pretend it doesn't exist until the tragedy is upon us and small amounts of resources such as hospice are available to help us with this part of life that happens to each and every one of us.

 

Just thinking this through out loud. I don't know how much time my father has left to live. He's often told me he could die any time, partly due to some men in our family dying young, and also no doubt due to his experience as a family practitioner, where one deals with sickness and death regularly. So I internalized this about my dad, in some ways grieving for him years ago. But now the more imminent possibility is upon me, and I wonder how to work with it while maintaining my sometimes stressful busy life as a physicist and just taking care of myself. I think I will get back to some of my art work and some of my family history projects. It feels like this is the best way I can contribute to the collective process of living and dying and making meaning in our world that sometimes moves so fast and changes so quickly that if we're not careful, everything we care about may have disappeared.

 

 

 

 

My talk at NSLS-II user meeting

 I gave a talk yesterday about my work on online models and control of x-ray beamlines at the NSLS-II user's meeting.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3qgdn3zja4bvgcl/blicon_NSLSII_UM_presentation2.pdf?dl=0

Family story

I read journals written by my father 25 years ago and I get to know a little more about someone I never really knew. Someone who was never available to me.

I continue to try to piece together a complex story and my self that would need to be the glue, just isn't strong enough. The pieces clank together, unwieldy and not fitting. A failed marriage. A death. And perhaps my father as well was not up to the task to put the pieces together and so left it to me.

Tools for physics and art

 Trying to get back to being able to calculate stuff in physics, I remember how important discipline and organization are. Where do you write things? Where do you put the paper when completed? If you write on a white board, how do you record it or collect the results going ahead?

 And there's similar discipline associated with digital work. How to store Mathematica notebooks? At what stage to write up an argument in LaTeX? How to make a good bibliography in bibtex that you can reuse? How to store and access pdfs of reference material?

 How to store and access books? Does one have a home library where one knows easily where to find Griffiths and Jackson and books on physical chemistry and non-linear dynamics? Does one have a pattern of going to the nearby library and knowing how to find books on the shelf there? 

And back to digital, how to organize Jupyter notebooks? And what github repositories does one depend on? What regular habits of computer maintenance and upgrade must one have to ensure access and consistency of one's digital tools?

I feel like I moved forward haphazardly regarding all these tools and I've been left without consistent practice. On all fronts, it's more difficult to use these tools. Discipline is about making choices and following through on them.

But one needs a clear goal in order for that discipline to not be arbitrary. This vacation time is a good chance to consider both the goals and associated practice of working well with ideas and calculations.

I've also been focusing on art and painting recently. And there's also an associated set of disciplines there, that I've been slipping on. Cleaning brushes. Organizing space. Caring for materials. Yet, again, discipline without goals is sterile. A fruitful mess can be better.