Brain Damage Method

A long time ago I used to attend a karate course. Sometimes we had a training unit where we practiced a number of totally different techniques with no pauses in between them, or a sequence of katas without breaks. Our trainer called this the brain damage method. In theory it should lead to better coordination of movements and techniques. The reason for that was that you stopped thinking at some point when everything got too confusing. I really loved that and I still stick to that idea.
However my everyday work sometimes seems to be an example for the brain damage method. This week I read Quine, a Latour biography, several scientific papers, some pages of a microbiology book, some EU directives and parts of the Cartagena protocol. In my spare time I read Terry Prachett's Snuff and walked the dog and read the manual of our new washing machine. I read a local newspaper and also the web edition of another paper. I visited Facebook once in a while (too often) and occasionally I watched a crime series on TV: Brain damage method…
The problem is: I don't know what I achieve with my everyday brain damage method. I think I produce a full cup of tea as in the zen story with the zen master and the university professor.
Nevertheless, I like it somehow. I think it enhances the ability to enjoy diversity, different aspects of thinking, different realms of society.
And once in a while I also manage to empty the cup again.

Impressions

Impressionistic paintings are very nice. Everyday impressions, on the other hand are like Koans.
My favorite impression from a few weeks ago was, when my dog ran straight into a parked mountain-bike because he was watching another dog. This was a real exciting live Zen lesson.
This is what we do all the time. Sometimes we are really distracted by looking at things but most of the time it is our thoughts that interfere with the here and now.
Today I walked the dog through Bauernbergpark. At the lower end of Rosseggerstraße there is a junction with a traffic light. When I arrived there, another man was waiting on the other side for the lights to turn green. He almost missed it because he was so concentrated on his mobile phone, writing a message. So my dog is not the only one.
Myself, I keep running into these bikes very often. I have learnt to avoid that but I struggle to keep up the discipline.
There are many impressions on a single day. We keep passing through little moments in other peoples lives, as Pirsig used to say. It makes me feel tired.
I have to meditate.
Good night.

The Return of the Bauernbergpark Man

He is back. He has moved his sleeping bag to the pavilion. Of course I am too much of a coward to ask him where he has been and that I am glad to have him back.
However, it is a bad time to return. Winter is coming. It will not be his first winter in the park, though.
I am back in my warm office, but I shudder. He is still out there, maybe feeling warm.
This is a strange world, indeed.

Junker

Although you might expect something else, Junker is a young Austrian white wine. Nothing else.
I have just dined exclusively well, I might say. Some beef with vegetables  and noodles, accompanied by two glasses of Junker and followed by a "whitie" which is a brownie with white chocolate. I did all this in my favorite restaurant and had a chat there about Bruno Latour and about Kopenhagen.
I have a fresh haircut and I discussed psychology with an Austrian, a Japanese and a Kosvar this afternoon.
I should be rather happy.
However, I am confused, and I have good reasons for it.
It is the dynamics of life that cannot be beaten by a single Junker or two.
Sadness and darkness on one side, hope and joy on the other side. The tension is sometimes unbearable.
So maybe tonight I will order another Junker and raise my glass to the Bauernbergpark Man.
He is definitely gone.
He is a symbol for me, a symbol of ambivalence, a legend and a sad thing nevertheless. Maybe the statue of Pan on the lower edge of Bauernbergpark is also a statue to him.
I am drifting away, as so often.
Today it is only the fault of the Junker.

Order

As soon as we give it a name, it looses its innocence.
As soon as we apply a metaphor it looses its universality.
As soon as we squeeze reality into the tight concept of an order it becomes an abstraction, a model a caricature.

Still some of us believe in an order out there for sheer comfort.
There is order if you keep on looking for it, but even the nice low entropic crystals have tiny faults in their structure.
Order is death. Order is the end of time.

However, we are the representatives of order and complexity.
Therefore we not only incorporate it, but we
also make it wherever we can.

In the end it is an illusion, a ghost in the all-encompassing flow of eternity.

Sometimes it is all we can cling to.
Sometimes it strangles us.

And chaos?
I do not know much about it.
Therefore I keep quiet and tidy up my desk.

That is all I can do.

More of Autumn

The leaves have fallen. Most of them have fallen to the ground. First they were bright yellow and brown. Now all of them are wet from the rain and have acquired a uniform dirty brown color.
I still do not know where the Bauernbergpark Man has gone to. Even the last tiny heap of gravel that he had left on a rock next to the street is gone.
Sometimes, when I walk past one of his favorite park benches I think I can smell the wet clothes of the Man.
However, he is gone.
This autumn I have been close to the Grim Reaper myself, not because I was close to death, but because of someone else I know. Although his vicinity has some ugly aspects, such as the uniform dirty brown of the fallen leaves, it is also something peaceful and quiet, that he promises beyond this ugliness.
So that's what autumn is. And if the Man has left his autumn behind somehow, I know that he is somewhere, where he does not have to cry, where he does not need to shiver from the cold or run around screaming like a maniac.
Still, sometimes because of his absence, I wonder if the sun will rise tomorrow. Anyway, winter is coming, and the sun can hide behind the clouds for a while.

Lou Reed

I wonder if I can say something meaningful about someone who I didn't know at all.
So you better read what Iggy Pop has to say.
Nevertheless, one day I went out in front of a rather big audience, showed a banana to them and made a reference to the famous Velvet Underground album (Nobody understood what I meant but at least some of them got curious).
At school I always envied another guy who played some Lou Reed songs on the guitar, which was much cooler than my hopeless efforts of trying to play Hendrix riffs.
Finally I have to admit that I love "Heroin", "Rock'N'Roll" and "Satellite of Love" ( and almost all of the other stuff)
There is nothing more I can say.

One of my poems

In a momentary creative phase I have written some more poems.
Here is one: In German of course.
One day there will also be a poem about the Bauernbergpark Man.
But that one will have to be very good.

Sackgasse

In einer Ecke der Sackgasse

ganz am Ende

da steht sich der Riese die Füße in den Bauch.

Er dreht sich im Kreis herum

und er dreht sich im Kreis im herum

Bar jeder Angst fragt er sich doch wo er ist

und stellt fest

dass er sich gar am Ende der Sackgasse befindet

ganz im Eck

und er fühlt sich wohl

Er ist dem Einbahnstraßenschild in die Sackgasse gefolgt

und nun ist er hier

frei von jedem Verfolgungswahn

und frei von jeglichem Ziel

jetzt setzt er sich nieder und holt Luft

die besser ist als er dachte

hier in der Ecke der Sackgasse

am Ende der Einbahnstraße

So frei war ich Vorgestern nicht

dachte der Riese und holte noch einmal tief Luft

Am Ende der Sackgasse

in einer Ecke der Einbahnstraße

Da kam der alte Mann und setzte sich zu ihm

Und erzählte ihm vom nirgendwo

zwischen dem Nichts und der Leere

und beide lächelten

Und erst als der Vollmond aufgegangen war

hörten sie auf zu lächeln

um noch ein wenig hier zu verweilen

am Ende der Sackgasse

am Ende der Einbahnstraße

im leeren Nirgendwo

Bauernbergpark Autumn

Colored leaves everywhere. I walk the dog along the park benches where the Man used to live. Gone. I am facing decisions that I consider important. For whom? The Bauernbergpark Man is gone and the autumn leaves will soon be covered with snow. One day my dog will be gone, another day I will be gone. One day even the park will be gone. Autumn makes me have these thoughts.
However, when I walk the dog in the autumn in Bauernbergpark, I enjoy the cool air and the colors and I hope that the Man is somewhere safe and warm and in a place still as beautiful as the park.
When the autumn is gone, I promise, I will write about philosophy and synthetic biology again. For now, let's stay sentimental and listen to Pink Floyd's Grantchester Meadows one more time...

Autumn

The Bauernbergpark Man seems to be gone forever...

I am trying to sell my record collection...

I have not used Twitter for about three months. I could as well delete my account...

Ha. It is autumn indeed...

Brave New World II

After Huxley there must be Komarek...

1988: I read parts of Brave New World for the first time. Because of our English teacher those without any sex. Hard to find...

2013: I read the whole book. It is indeed brilliant, except maybe the shift from Bernard Marx to the Savage as the central figure. The dystopia is indeed stronger than the story line. The final dialogue between Mustapha Mond and John is really fascinating, disturbing and makes you wonder about mankind and society. What is the price that we pay for stability?

2300: I will (most probably) be dead. At least in the form that I inhabit now. This Blog will (hopefully) be banned. We will live in a... oh bugger I am a bad science-fiction writer. I say, it will be different from today.

and now I am reading Alfred Komarek's "Die Villen der Frau Hürsch", very Austrian, very slow, and not very dystopian, with a hint of Schnaps and Schweinsbraten between all the pages...it is like listening to folk music after free jazz and still we walk the same planet, and somehow miss the Bauernbergpark Man, whose brave new world seems to be somewhere else now.

Brave New World

To be able to understand modern myths like test tube babes or Bokanovsky processes, I have decided to read Brave New World again. Accompanied by Captain Beefheart's "Trust Us" as soundtrack, I try to write down my impressions after the first half of the book.
Unfortunately, he got some things right, one of the true prophets. While Orwell's Big Brother has just recently made the news (NSA), Huxley's consumerism is around for a while. We throw away food in enormous quantities, buy Asian shit textiles and are too lazy to repair stuff. Globalization is something, that Aldous didn't like too much. We on the other hand still live in these savage national states. What's better?
The amazing thing about his novel is the dystopian aspect just slightly before Hitler and the Nazis left their mark on the world, proving that there is more than one dystopia.
But what can we learn from Huxley without being reactionist bastards? Now we have got IVF and Dolly. We got synthetic biology and stem cell research.
Somehow this huge electric fence around some places starts to make sense. But to protect which side?
OK. Huxley didn't get the h-bomb and the world wide web, but be aware when his book was written.
It is indeed a classic.
We want everything clean and sterile and we want to be happy all the time. This, my friends, will never work out in this world.
Calmness and peace of mind, yes, but endless joy: no. And I am only talking about individuals. It is the same with society. So forget all the utilitarian promises and wisdom. I recommend other ways.
But enough for today.
The Bauernbergpark Man is still missing. He has completely disappeared. He was my personal savage and shaman, to whom I was too frightened to talk. Maybe I will never have the chance again to do that.
What a brave new world.

Bauernbergpark Man Missing

The Bauernbergpark Man has disappeared. There is no sign of him. Only very old small heaps of gravel still tell his story. What has happened to him? Is he dead, in an asylum, in prison or just somewhere else?
I think he is gone for a few months now and I wonder who will make the sun rise tomorrow?

The Book of Questions 2

Which yellow bird

fills its nest with lemons?

Cuál es el pájaro amarillo

que llena el nido de limones?

from Pablo Neruda "The Book of Questions"

translated by William O'Daly

Copper Canyon Press 2001

London

10 impressions from SB 6.0

1.      Maria Mercedes Roca’s talk was the emotional highlight of the conference. She put an emphasis on the need for modern biology with respect to the idea of sustainable industrial agriculture. Moreover, she presented the asymmetry of regulatory power between industrialized and developing countries.

2.      The session on responsible research and innovation, chaired by Claire Marris was mainly attended by social scientists. It was a parallel session in the Huxley building that started out with defining the term. To foster scientists’ positive attitude towards such a framework, it would be necessary to have such a session in the main auditorium.

3.      Some scientists complained that there were too many talks about ethical, social or regulatory issues or about future possibilities compared to actual scientific state-of-the-art talks.

4.      Apart from Maria Mercedes Roca’s talk and the appearance of an open letter outside the conference, there was a general lack of criticism, controversy and diversity of opinions as regards the social embedding of synthetic biology, its future visions and the aspect of a possible bioeconomy.

5.      The general atmosphere for meeting people (breaks, poster sessions, conference dinner) were nice but could be improved in some aspects. Especially the conference dinner offered not much against group segregation (social scientist-table, biobricks-table, etc.) There could be a setting with randomized table cards to foster communication with people you had never met before.

6.      Sometimes the conference setting was too much of a one-way communication event with not enough interactive elements. There could have been threads with workshops on one of the three days.

7.      The field seems to have grown together in some respects but a struggle for standards is still at an early stage. However, the diversity of the SB community is something very unique. Engineers, biologists, social scientists, philosophers, computer specialists, chemical engineers, biophysicists and so forth are the audience of the conference: More than 750 delegates and speakers from 44 countries all over the world.

8.      The set-up of the poster sessions gave certain advantages to presenters with lower numbers, because their posters were hanging in the Queen’s Tower room, where coffee and lunch breaks were held.

9.      The deficit model of science communication is still pretty much in the heads of the actors at SB 6.0 although also diverse statements against it (e.g. the frightening power of the confirmation bias) were heard.

10.  A still predominant motive is the fear of the GMO-ghost, uniting the rows of scientists but not so much some of the other actors in the field. Still some pose the question: What can the SB community do better, while others declare that the diversity of participants at SB conferences and projects is already something that discerns SB from the problematic approaches in times of genetic engineering.

The Book of Questions 1

Why don't the immense airplanes

fly around with their children?

Por qué los inmensos aviones

no se pasean con sus hijos?

from Pablo Neruda "The Book of Questions"
translated by William O'Daly
Copper Canyon Press 2001

After the flood

...there is a heatwave.
The impact of both are not very severe for myself. However, the impact on my conscience are considerable.
The Bauernbergpark Man has reappeared on his new double-bed place (double park bench) and seems to enjoy the heat. For him it is probably the first time this year to get really dry.
Although I have spent two Euros on a homeless guy this morning, I failed to help an elderly lady with a walking-aid thing in the tram today. My first failure today.
My second problem is that I haven't done anything for the flood victims yet.
I would like to donate some money but I do not trust the administrative channels, the money is pumped into. So I think I will wait for a direct opportunity to help, like the one that I missed today. However, a middle-ages lady helped the other woman and showed me how it works.
Next time I will help, too, instead of being to slow and too passive.
As regards philosophy, consider this as an excursion into the pragmatics and ethics of everyday life.
C'est la vie.

Meditations

Today, while I was meditating, I had (unintended of course) some thoughts: there is a sort of analogy between the duality of some brain domains and some metaphysical views. Zen, among other things, deals with the abolition of dualities. Thus mind/body, matter/idea or other dualities could be abolished without the help of reductionism. The reductionist position always puts one before the other. But are there not connection lines like in a dynamic interaction between action and structure in social theory?

As Sociologist (and Sociogole [for all those who know what this is]) you learn to hold different opinions or perspectives, as long as you don't like to position a theory as "the" theory. Many are satisfied with the specialization in one theoretical framework, in one world of thought. But where are the bridges?
In the way that there is "ratio" and "emotio", there is also materialism and idealism, or is there a continuum in both cases, one in which we as human beings only inscribe our shameless dichotomy.
Also the relation between theory and praxis seems to be part of this problem.
Be the world will and imagination or just matter, this, for me as sociologist also only means to take a position, to hold an opinion, a perspective.

If you assume such a perspective, in one second the degrees of freedom that are left are reduced to zero, and you are trapped in a fully deterministic model: all just mind, or all just matter.
If you leave the perspective behind, the one-sided perspective and you will be accused of excessive holism.

Finally, also in this case there is a continuum, from one-sided reductionism to all-encompassing holism.
Also in this case we can, no we could, save ourselves on the island of emptiness, if it were not also a form of holism, or is it reductionism?
Voilà - we come to a subsidiary tool (emptiness), that is well understood in the East and which gives us the delight of being able to bath in the paradox. We do not like that very much in the West.
All in all, this, these thoughts from the last meditation, this debris of mind, shall be a plea for the building of bridges of thought, emotion, epistemology and perception: a way towards synthesis and convergence and a path away from dead-end-road differentiation.

Bauernbergpark News Again

The man has put two park benches together to make a bed for himself. He has a blue sleeping bag. Recently he owns a knife too, which scares me a little. However, he only seems to use it for sharpening tips of branches to stick them into the ground, or to arrange them in other ways. This arrangement of benches and twigs is almost in the middle of the path, in the lower bend on the north side of Bauernbergpark. When I walk the dog, I carefully avoid this place when the man is there for two reasons. Firstly I am afraid of him, secondly I do not want the dog to spoil the man's territory. It has been raining for the last three days and the man has not shown up at his park benches. Maybe he has a dry place somewhere else.

Vacuum

Is there a vacuum between decisions? Is everything continuous?
Is there a way to get rid of all those black and white dichotomies/dualities in the minds of people?
Is there always someone to blame?

Ich bin hier/ I am here

The first words of one of my favorite songs: "Euer Fritze mit der Spritze" by Boris Bukowski are: Ich bin hier - (I am here). It is about a guy who gets sent into an asylum. However, dear reader, you are not here. When you read this, ask yourself, are you even where you are? Or are you trapped in the web instead of kissing your girlfriend (boyfriend), walking the dog (stroking the cat) or reading philosophy (poetry). This is a warning. Go back to where you are. Be there. That is all I have to say now.

Fundamental decisions II: The past and the future

The past is a memory, a trace in our heads. The future is an illusion. What remains is the present which is in a constant flux.
Zimbardo has analysed the psychological concepts of time very nicely. My favorite aspect is that eastern concepts of an all-encompassing present are not measurable with scientific constructs.
So they seem to be real.
Maybe time is also a matter of belief.
However, it is our obligation to be here, to be now and to live here and now. We constantly fail to do so. We have fears and hopes or live in our memories. The magic is here and now. So let's shut up and do some more Zazen.
Let all philosophers sleep and dream, and carry on with the good work and practice.
LAUGHTER

End

Fundamental decisions 1

Before we can consider problems of everyday life, such as synthetic biology or computational chemistry, we have to solve some fundamental problems.
The first question is that of reality: Do we live in a place called reality, is this reality something external or internal, or do we live in a simulation, either a gigantic, universal, external one, or are we the only one in the simulation (that should be said in another way: Am I the only one in this simulation).
How can we start to think about that without going mad? I guess a lot of people have considered this question more or less systematically.
We leave the question of a maker of this reality and about the guys who run the simulation aside for a while.
a) The real exists and is external to us:
Ha: Even if we are in a simulation, there has to be some place real where the simulation is run, even if it is a black hyper-intelligent blob at the end of another parallel universe. So that is nice indeed. Even though our minds are distorted by thinking and by weird heuristics, we regularly bump into things, which means: There is something out there. All the materialistic and empiristic traditions bring us to a real world. It is only a problem of our senses, to get it right.
b) The real exists but is only in our minds:
A tricky one, that I have never fully understood. I miss the social component in this and especially the things we regularly bump into. A shared universe should be external to us. But the trick is that the only way to know the world is with our senses and our mind. That makes us alone, and unique spectators of the universe. Another nice aspect, I can live with.
c) We are in a huge simulated universe
Nice technology, I would say. Especially the sensation of bumping into things, is done really perfectly.
I guess it does not make a difference, except maybe possible afterlives, but that is another issue.
d) I am the only one in this simulation
Still rather nice technology, given the complexity, that I experience. Especially the error messages that frequently pop up above, add to the realistic feeling. Well done. I guess if I get out of this I either wake up in a tank full of liquid, wired to whatever, or I have 8 legs and look insect like.

I hope to have the time to read some philosophical ideas about all that.

A new project

There will be a new project. The project concerns this blog.
The first comment from the audience that guesses what it is wins an ornamental Bauernberg-Voodoo Tattoo.
;-)