If you have visited this website more than once, I’m humbled. That is, I’m humbled by the thought that I can hold your interest. Of course, you might have come repeatedly because you find the blogs strange: “I can’t believe he thinks that. Is there no end to the madness? Hey, Clyde, you gotta read this. It’s like watching a major fail on YouTube.”
 
Pride tells me you’ve come back because I offer points of departure for your own insights; and that even though I might not have any answers the great philosophers haven’t already offered, I am your enabler. I am the catalyst for those many insights you have had but have been too busy to address more fully.
 
If you have found a smidgen of creativity or entertainment here, you might stop to ask, “Is this guy for real?” That, in American vernacular, has two meanings: “Is he crazy?” and “How does he come up with this stuff?” But it might also mean “Is this a real person or an artificial intelligence?" Why should I propose that you ask?
 
If an AI system nearly won a writing contest in Japan, is it possible that I am not human?* Have I passed the Turing test? If so, how would you know?
 
True, you could do some research. You could find out where I live, where I worked, what science text books I coauthored, and what research I did for the government or private business. There’s even a picture of me on my Twitter account. But the picture could be fake, a composite image of a guy smiling happily—or, to someone, vacantly—into the lens of a digital camera. And in an Age of Counterfeit, I might also have a fictional history (If you discover such, don’t tell my family. I wouldn’t want them to think they are virtual people).
 
Really, how do you know that some AI, and not some “real” person, writes these blogs? Do I pass a Turing test because I am truly human? Or maybe you are a solipsist, and you believe all exists in your mind or in some larger Nous, making my existence totally dependent upon you and meaning that you, not I, actually write the blogs on this website.
 
You’ve come to another point of departure: In the absence of some physical body (the physical entity would be irrelevant to a solipsist’s perspective), what is the evidence that I am human and not a machine? Or, you might ask yourself an even larger question: “How do I define and recognize ‘human’?”
 
Do you daily apply the Turing test? If so, does it have component parts like multiple-choice tests that might be applicable to all who claim the designation “human”? Or do you compose some essay answer that is different for each “human” you encounter (or, for the solipsist, “dream up”)?
 
 
*Olewitz, Chloe, A Japanese AI program just wrote a short novel, and it almost won a literary prize. March 23, 2016, Digital Trends at https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/japanese-ai-writes-novel-passes-first-round-nationanl-literary-prize/  

Now we have proof. Fur seals are afraid of sharks. No, really. There’s been a three-year study. Surprised?
 
The research published in Ecology is “Physiological Stress Responses to Natural Variation in Predation Risk: Evidence from White Sharks and Seals.”* The authors looked at stress hormone levels in Arctocephalus pusillus (fur seal) colonies and found those levels increase “when the risk of great white shark attack” is high.**
 
Too much stress, as we have been told by professionals ranging from psychologists to heart specialists, isn’t good for humans (Homo sapiens sapiens), and apparently, it’s not so good for other animals, including fur seals. Not that we need to be told about something we have personally experienced or witnessed in others.
 
The authors of the article point out that such shark-induced stress is ecologically harmful and that it can lead to a reduction of the fur seal population. Maybe so. Nevertheless, learning the obvious seems to be a waste of time. What, for example, can the researchers do to eliminate stress in fur seals except to eliminate the sharks. No sharks, no shark-induced stress. Happy fur seals frolicking in the sea, but eating other animals who fear them.
 
Is it a bit ironic that in sometimes assessing causes of stress, we use a sliding scale of measurement? Is there any stress in walleye Pollock, squids, salmon, Pacific sandlance, northern smoothtongue, and Pacific herring in the Bering Sea, and those same fishes plus capelin, Pacific whiting, Pacific saury, and rockfishes in the northern Pacific? Especially at night when fur seals prefer to hunt.***
 
There’s a chain of stress in natural habitats, and there’s another one in artificial ones. There will never be a stress-free ecology, nor will there ever be a stress-free human environment. Risk and conflict occur, and when any animal realizes either instinctively or consciously that both can occur unexpectedly, stress hormones flow.
 
Most likely, the concerned researchers of the study don’t have a mechanism that fur seal might use during the seasons when white sharks seek them for food. And that’s when we see whether studying the obvious bears any practical fruit. But with humans?
 
According to HealthPrep online stress “may lead to chronic inflammation, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and obesity.”*** So, that website and others offer ways to relieve stress—all probably good advice.
 
But I think I can reduce lists of ten steps, or five steps, or you-name-the-number of stress relief mechanisms to one: If you are a fur seal, don’t swim in shark-infested waters, if you are a fish, don’t swim in fur seal-infested waters, and if you are a human don’t live in human-infested environments. Otherwise, learn to live in a risky and stressful world.
 
*Hammerschlag, Neil, et al., Ecology. December 1, 2017, DOI: 10.1002/ecy.2049
 
**Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. Stress Test: New Study Finds Seals Are Stressed-out by Sharks. December 5, 2017. Online at http://www.rsmas.miami.edu/news-events/press-releases/2017/stress-test-new-study-finds-seals-are-stressed-out-by-sharks/
***North Pacific Universities Marine Mammal Research Consortium. Northern Fur Seal Biology Diet. Online at http://www.marinemammal.org/biology/northern-fur-seal/diet/
 
****Stress and the 10 Truths behind the Damage It Causes online at http://healthprep.com/living-healthy/stress-and-the-10-truths-behind-the-damage-it-causes/?utm_source=bing-search&utm_medium=referral&utm_term=dealing%20with%20stress&utm_content={creative}&utm_campaign=(HP-DTM-US-DSP-RT)-Stress-And-The-10-Truths-Behind-The-Damage-It-Causes
 

Guys can be like little kids when they get a new car or truck, especially when the vehicle has a noticeable pickup from zero. Nothing like that feel of acceleration, that artificial gravity that one perceives as going backward while going forward. It turns highways into roller coasters when there’s little chance of a speeding violation.
 
So, when I recently bought a Dodge Ram Rebel, I admit it: I had to accelerate on an uphill onramp to an empty highway to get to the designated 70 mph limit. Wow! That was a few seconds of fun, and lots cheaper than a trip to an amusement park like Disney World. Then I realized that I know relatively nothing about acceleration beyond the experience of being in a commercial jet running the runway toward takeoff or being on one of those rapidly accelerating park rides at Disney. Imagine the difference in acceleration between what we ride and a bullet.  
 
As anyone who’s been in a car, train, or plane knows, once the vehicle gets to cruising speed, no matter what that speed is, the sense of movement, beyond the visual one, ceases. We can put our drinks down on the tray when we fly 500 mph without worrying that they will tumble into our laps. We experience additional G-force on takeoff, but nothing beyond sitting in a living room chair during flight.  
 
Now imagine riding on a bullet by comparison. It accelerates very rapidly, and it decelerates very rapidly, especially when it encounters a target. Your analog speedometer won’t record such acceleration or deceleration (really, they are both the same) very accurately. Enter people who study weaponry, such as the scientists at the National Nuclear Security Administration laboratories, the people who study shock-physics. For years they were limited to gathering data on velocity at about a dozen points on a moving surface, but now they are able to get almost ten times the data from a multiplexed photonic Doppler velocimeter.*
 
So, for what kinds of acceleration do scientists need such precise measuring? Something faster than my Dodge Ram Rebel or an even faster Porsche? Try acceleration to kilometer-per-second velocities in less than a billionth of a second. What a ride! Of course, we’re talking weapons, so, I wouldn’t want to be on the stopping end of such an object’s brief travel.
 
What’s the point? Well, acceleration is a thrill when it is reasonable. But we fool ourselves into thinking that we have no personal limits on acceleration, that, for example, we could get into a spaceship and go from whatever to the speed of light as we see spaceships do in science fiction movies. Only photons go the speed of light. Want to go that fast (186,000 miles per second)? Turn yourself into a photon, and in the process, turn your whole spaceship into photons. We have limits. In fact, all of us would get smashed during accelerations of a mere 15 Gs.** As the Eagles have lectured us in song: Life in the fast lane isn’t the ideal that popular culture would have us believe. Yet, we crave that acceleration, especially in youth.
 
The apparent plodding of daily living just doesn’t have the appeal that rapid-acceleration-living has until the accelerating individual runs up against human limitations or encounters some target. And yet, the experience of accelerating until one decelerates rapidly is the nature of many who enter into addictions or who take unnecessary risks.
 
All of us have limits that we learn as we go. We accelerate until we reach cruising speed—which, by the way, is the apparent goal of accelerating—or we encounter some obstacle, such as those biological or mental limits. There is no infinite acceleration, but for many that’s a hard lesson to learn in youth or in the beginning stages of addiction.
 
Cruising seems to be a boring state, so addicts of any kind seek further acceleration. But all of us have those human limits, those targets at the end of the journey that can make stopping a rather abrupt and unpleasant experience. Riding a bullet that accelerates to a kilometer per second in a billionth of a second might seem to be fun, but that same bullet also decelerates to zero in a split second. And traveling that fast very likely makes avoiding an obstacle impossible.
 
 
*Heller, Arnie. Ten times more data for shock-physics experiments. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. PDF Online at: https://str.llnl.gov/OctNov12/pdfs/10.12.6.pdf
 
**One G is normal Earth gravity. The fastest roller coaster ride, the Tower of Terror at Gold Reef City park in Johannesburg, Guateng, South Africa, doesn’t exceed 6.3 G.

Well, no, Pilgrim, I’m not saying that the seventeenth-century author of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) had access to a computer and the Internet or lived with social media as we know it. He didn’t have a smart phone, either, and no one took his picture every time he went through a highway toll booth or entered a convenience store. But if he lived now…
 
What’s your opinion of ex-cons? Bunyan was one. He hadn’t committed some robbery or murder. He went to prison because in 1664 the English Parliament under Charles II made meetings among more than five laypeople outside an official church illegal. Called conventicles, the meetings of the laity were supposedly a threat to the High Church of England. The law primarily affected Nonconformists. The prohibition followed the Act of Uniformity passed in 1662. When we think of uniformity, Orwell’s 1984 comes to mind, and we look to our current plight with political correctness, invasions of privacy through technology, and social media. Through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century we have seen the detrimental effects of “acts of uniformity” in totalitarian societies. But way back when…
 
Bunyan lived during a seventeenth-century version of 1984. That tells us a little about the so-called modern world. In western civilization from the Renaissance on, the mind was both liberated and imprisoned. Nonconformity has met an Orwellian fate for centuries. So, our current plight is nothing new.
 
In his introduction to Memoir of John Bunyan, editor George Offor offers:
 
“In proportion as a man becomes a public character, especially if eminent for talent and usefulness… so will his enemies increase. The envy of some and the malice of others will invent slanders, or, what is worse, put an evil construction upon the most innocent conduct, in the hope of throwing a shade over that brightness which reveals their own defects. In this they are aided by all the craft, and cunning…” p. 173).*
 
We might as well reconcile ourselves to this continuing way of the world. Nowadays, we don’t even have to have a government entity imposing “uniformity”; the loose conglomeration of minds in cyberspace continuously attempts to impose uniformity. We might, if we wish to maintain our individuality, follow the example of Bunyan, the religious and devout Dissenter.
 
Offor writes, “…for him to appear as a Dissenter and a public teacher, without going through the usual course of education and ordination, was an unpardonable offence. The opinions of man gave him no concern; all his anxiety was to have the approbation of his God, and then to walk accordingly, braving all the dangers, the obloquy, and contempt that might arise from his conscientious discharge of duties, for the performance of which he knew that he alone must give a solemn account at the great day” (p. 173).
 
Two questions: How many of us can truly say “the opinions of man” give us “no concern”? and How many of us have had insights that an establishment has rejected simply to protect an investment in uniformity?
 
As pilgrims on the road to freedom and individuality, we might consider whether or not we have made any progress.
 
 
*Offor, Esq. George, Editor. The Works of John Bunyan with an Introduction to Each Treatise, Notes, and a Sketch of His Life, Times, and Contemporaries. Online at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6049/pg6049-images.html

It’s virtually impossible to find anyone who is not complex. That’s our lot: Being Complex Beings. Regardless of calls from people like Henry David Thoreau and others to “simplify,” we are a rather restless bunch even when we consider just filling basic needs. And then those brains! Neurons aplenty busily chatting like neighbors at a barbeque. Even those who seek quiet solitude, such as contemplative priests, monks, or hermits, probably struggle with their own complexity. Such complexity has led some theologians and philosophers from Thomas Aquinas through the present to distinguish between finite being and Infinite Being: God has a “divine simplicity.” I’ll get back to that in a moment.
 
You have attributes that both you and others recognize. Others might even characterize you by some seemingly dominant attribute, say your kindness, your generosity, your anxiety, your anger. Deep down they know, as you know, you aren’t an attribute, that you have more than one attribute, and that, even, for example, if you are continuously kind, you can also be envious or avaricious or slothful. You aren’t, you would say, simply your chief attribute because you don’t want to be labeled, defined, and pigeonholed as one attribute personified. Even though some attributes might be universally praiseworthy, the thought of being limited to a single attribute denies your true complexity.
 
So, God, as the argument goes, is different. Oh! Yes. There’s that obvious eternal omniscient and ubiquitous stuff that separates the Infinite from the finite, but there’s another difference between the Divine and you in the thinking of Aquinas and others. God IS His (Just get over choosing a gender in this) attributes. You might be merciful; God, in contrast, IS Mercy, or Justice, or Omniscience, or Omnipresence. Interestingly and somewhat ironically, the concept of divine simplicity allows for many attributes, posing a problem for our chatty neurons: How do we explain being many yet simultaneously being simple? (Don’t try to solve this problem today)
 
Ignore that the principle of divine simplicity might be a bit of a contradiction because of all those attributes, and focus on the idea of associating attributes with individuals of our own finite kind. We say, for example, that people with apparent motiveless malignity who walk into a church, temple, or mosque to shoot strangers are not just evil actors, but ARE EVIL. Our personification of such heinousness is understandable because some acts exceed our ability to understand fully the complexity of human thought and behavior. One of our attributes, rationality, has particular difficulty with such acts. We simplify our understanding by associating attribute and individual. In a sense, we apply a Thomist concept to a finite human.
 
Put heinous acts aside. Do we do the same with “ordinary” people? Do we ascribe a simplicity to those around us based on some attribute we designate as a chief character trait? Are we like those anonymous social media users who pigeonhole, define, and label? If so, are we not ascribing a simplicity that, in fact, can’t coexist with complexity in a finite human being? You and I HAVE multiple attributes, and so do all others, but we are not personifications of those attributes. If we were, wouldn’t we be Godlike? And isn’t it ironic that those who would conflate attribute and person for purposes of denigration are actually ascribing a divine simplicity to those they intend to defame?

Every age has its orthodoxies, so having a “right opinion” isn’t new. And every age struggles with opposing “right opinions” and their manifestation in some “right practices” (orthopraxy). We aren’t going to change in some future utopian society. We’re stuck with both orthodoxy and orthopraxy for a simple reason, once iterated by Herbert Spencer in 1851: “Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.”*
 
Under “The Doctrine of Expediency” in Social Statics, Spencer writes a hypothetical discussion between “men” and a “philosopher” during which the “men” fault the philosopher for having an opinion that “dictates no sure mode of securing the desideratum.” They also ask, “Have you discovered a means of forming an infallible judgment?”
 
Here’s a really brief context: Spencer addresses the doctrine of expediency (utility or general good) that might best be defined as the “greatest happiness to the greatest number.” So, the desideratum is happiness for members of a society. The philosophical class might voice that such a goal is not only noble, but also moral. But the “objectors” in the discussion are interested not in the philosophy, but rather in the mode of achieving happiness, particularly in light of multiple definitions of happiness. Basically, talk is cheap.
 
Now, the men are a bit unfair to the philosopher because they “seek a system that can return a definite answer… [to the question] ‘is this act good?’…If you can show us…one—if you can give us an axiom from which we may develope [sic.] successive propositions until we have with mathematical certainty solved all our difficulties—we will thank you. If not, we must go elsewhere” (3, 4).
 
Prediction: In 2051, two hundred years after Spencer addressed having an opinion about providing the greatest good to the greatest number and the reliance on opinion rather than on specific, quantifiable plans, we will still be arguing about what is good for our society on the basis of some axiom. We argue so today, don’t we? In the political realm one group has one set of axioms, whereas an opposing group has another set. And since the groups can neither agree on the validity of basic assumptions nor accept the other group’s premises, we wallow in “philosophy.”
 
The conflict over achieving the desideratum of the greatest good for the greatest number underlies every society's politics. We want certainty, but we have no way of getting it. Depending on the group with which we have affinity, we see the other side’s orthopraxy as ineffective or worse. Since we are reliant on axioms and obstinate about opinions based on feelings, we can’t reconcile our differences.
 
So, don’t get your undies in a tangle when you discuss opinions. Rather, say, “No doubt, you have the right opinion. Yours is the orthodox view. I will grant that. Now, will you give me an infallible path to securing the desideratum we both seek? I’m just a lost soul looking to you for an axiom that leads to propositions that, in turn, will give me with mathematical certainty the solutions to society’s problems.”
 
It’s a cruel trick to play on an opponent, of course. You will put the burden of certainty on another, saving you from having to achieve mathematical certainty and having to defend your own opinion that is probably based as much on feeling as it is on any semblance of infallible logic.
 
*Spencer, Herbert, Social Statics: The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed. London. John Chapman, 1851.

Here’s a different definition of flat-worlder: A person lacking ambition. Now, I’m not writing about people who are “down on their luck” through circumstances beyond their control. Rather, flat-worlders in this context have an attitude predicated on a world without hills worth climbing, an endless plain, a surface over which such flat-worlders travel with minimal effort. That kind of person who either does not see an elevation worth climbing or sees the elevation, but decides the climb is not worth the energy expenditure, is a flat-worlder.
 
The idea of “up” is important to us. We use it metaphorically in economics and achievements. We think of rising to the “top”—different in various contexts, of course.
 
If there were a way to measure how people of different geographic regions saw “up” and “down,” we might see whether or not physical place has been a control on ambition before the rise of the modern world. Today, there’s been a dissemination of virtual geography, making any research in the subject dubious. One might see those who live their lives exclusively on a wide plain open up their laptops to see Earth’s many geologic features or even the highlands and lowlands of a distant moon or planet. And, of course, there are those high-standing roller coasters in amusement parks across the Coastal Plain.
 
Once I mentioned to a Miami-born child that I missed the hills of the Appalachians. Having never been outside southern Florida, the child said, “We have hills here.”
 
I asked where, and he responded, “There’s one over there,” as he pointed to a highway overpass bridge. His real sense of a natural hill was limited to an artificial highland, and we have many of them on the coastal plain of eastern United States. There is, for example, Mt. Trashmore in Virginia, and farther north one can see other large trash piles, discreetly covered with vegetation and even trails and playgrounds. But back to the point: Because our brains are conditioned by experience and because much of that experience is visual and gravitational, we might from the time we are children see up and down as significant metaphors for success. Even if one lacks ambition, he is unlikely to say, “I hope that through hard work, I can stay at the same level.”
 
The ponderous plodding toward some “height” or “peak” toward which anyone climbs requires energy, and few are willing to expend the necessary energy if they see no change in elevation. So, how do you see your goals, as distant points on a flat plain or as distant heights? And do you see artificial hills (the Miami child’s idea of a hill) as obstacles too great to pass? There will always be artificial highlands. The question for each of us is whether or not we think of the artificial (the imposed, the anthropogenic) highlands as the ultimate “up,” and the failure to reach the “top” as the ultimate “down.”

Oh! No! Mercury appears to be going backwards.
 
I thought Copernicus and Kepler had finally resolved the retrograde problem when they explained that the planets, the Wanderers, only seemed to move in “forward” and “backward” motions because of our changing perspective. Imagine cars racing around an elliptical (oval?) track. The drivers note the relative position of other cars from the perspectives of being on a smaller or larger ellipse, on the inside or outside path around the track. If a driver passes another, he sees that other car appear to move backwards, even though both vehicles move forward. Now imagine both cars on opposite sides of the track traveling at different speeds. The perspective would make cars appear to move sometimes backward and sometimes forward. That backward movement is called retrograde, and it was a big problem for those who observed a sky they believed revolved around a stationary Earth. Copernicus, and then Kepler, identified Earth and the other planets as those race cars, the paths of forward and backward motion their orbits. Mercury has the inside path and orbits the sun every 88 days; Earth is third out and has a 365.25-day run. Uranus, even farther out, makes its circuit at 30,688.5 Earth days. It’s easy for Mercury to lap Earth and even easier for Earth to lap distant Uranus.
 
Understanding retrograde planetary motions requires only rudimentary knowledge of Copernicus and Kepler. But hundreds of years of established facts mean little when people rely solely on their personal experience. Every generation has those who insist on reinventing the wheel, or, in this instance, the way planets wheel around the sky. With regard to understanding our physical world, we all begin in ignorance, regardless of what those a priori philosophers might tell us. And that initial ignorance is the way superstition and misinformation creep through history. So, is it a surprise that the current issue of The Old Farmer’s Almanac has advice on what to do when Mercury is in retrograde? The advice, such as “…before Mercury retrogrades, finish any tasks or projects at hand,” has no basis in anything other than ancient astrological beliefs.* Yet, there will be those in this generation—and in future generations—who will be concerned that the appearance of a race-track planet’s motion is an absolute, and not a relative, phenomenon and that retrograde motion has some control over human life.
 
Now, I know that if someone has never studied the centuries-old astrophysical knowledge of Copernicus and Kepler, there might be a tendency to understand the celestial objects from the limited perspective of personal experience. Of course, that experience, because we don’t feel Earth’s motion and don’t stand outside the Solar System, is essentially correct enough for daily living: It really doesn’t matter that on the way to the grocery store someone thinks that Mercury is running itself “backward.” The groceries will still be there; life will go on. It does matter, however, if one shapes tasks and attitudes by a distant and misunderstood planetary motion that was explained centuries ago.
 
That brings me to Shopenhauer’s essay on logic and dialectic. In “The Art of Controversy,” the philosopher distinguishes between the two, defining the former as “’the science of the laws of thought, that is, of the method of reason’” and the latter as “’the art of disputation.’”* Logic, according to Shopenhauer, is “the process of pure reason” that “should be capable of being constructed a priori. Dialectic, for the most part, can be constructed only a posteriori; that is to say, we may learn its rules by an experiential knowledge of the disturbance which pure thought suffers through the difference of individuality manifested in the intercourse between two rational beings....”***
 
Let’s belabor the point with regard to Dialectic. Shopenhauer continues:
 
            …two rational beings, and also by acquaintance with the means which disputants adopt in order to make good against one another their own individual thought, and to show that it is pure and objective. For human nature is such that if A. and B. are engaged in thinking in common, and are communicating their opinions to one another on any subject, so long as it is not a mere fact of history, and A. perceives that B.’s thoughts on one and the same subject are not the same as his own, he does not begin by revising his own process of thinking, so as to discover any mistake which he may have made, but he assumes that the mistake has occurred in B.’s. In other words, man is naturally obstinate; and this quality in him is attended with certain results, treated of in the branch of knowledge which I should like to call Dialectic, but which, in order to avoid misunderstanding, I shall call Controversial or Eristical Dialectic. Accordingly, it is the branch of knowledge which treats of the obstinacy natural to man…Controversial Dialect is the art of disputing, and of disputing in such a way as to hold one’s own, whether one is in the right or wrong--per fas et nefas.
 
Ah! Per fas et nefas. Maybe you don’t know the Latin phrase, but you certainly have witnessed its manifestation in the numerous political and social arguments that stream daily across your smart phone, pad, or TV. It’s also manifest in the adherence to an ancient belief system that suggests some little rocky body called Mercury can influence your life simply because you see it from different perspectives throughout the year. Yes, right or wrong there will be those like the editors of The Old Farmer’s Almanac who will push millennia-old misunderstandings as truth by which one should live and govern the details of daily life. Yes, Mercury’s retrograde motion is in the minds of many a cause for concern—even though we know the proven race-track model of explanation offered long ago by Copernicus and Kepler.
 
Obstinate in your belief? Choosing Dialectic over Logic? Think personal experience is the ultimate guide to truth about the physical world? Choosing Dialectic over Logic in your daily intercourse with others?
 
Example: After explaining the geomorphology of streams to a freshman college geology class, I addressed the issue of flow direction. Streams flow downhill—though there’s an argument that the Mississippi flows slightly uphill through the sinking delta because of the push from the mass of water behind it, and another argument centered on the effects of tidal bores. Nevertheless, measurements and logic tell us that streams flow downhill just as shower water falls from the showerhead. So, I made the point that compass direction is irrelevant. Streams flow from higher ground to lower ground, from mountains to basins (both interior, as the Truckee River flows to landlocked Pyramid Lake in Nevada, and exterior, as most rivers ultimately empty into the ocean). Down a slope. That’s the important point. But after class a student approached me and said, “My mother told me that the Monongahela River flows backwards.” (Yes, like you, I tried to picture the front and back of water)
 
I said, “She probably means that the Monongahela trends toward the north, but that’s a common misconception based on the misunderstanding that makes synonyms of ‘up and down’ and ‘north and south.’ There are many rivers that flow north, including the Nile, which starts in the highlands of the tropics and flows downhill to the Mediterranean Sea. Remember the key to flow is the pull of gravity, not direction. And north is not ‘up’; otherwise, if I were to walk north, I would start on the floor and head toward the ceiling. That misconception occurs because we hang flat maps with north up, but we could just as easily hang them with north down, and it’s a reason that people in Pennsylvania might say, ‘down south’ and people in Alabama might say, ‘up north.’”
 
Her response, “I don’t care; that’s what my mother said.” Eristical Dialectic: pure and simple. The obstinate human mind.
 
Still worried about how the retrograde motion of Mercury will affect your life? It might not be logical, but it is certainly understandable given the role that the Eristical Dialectic plays in understanding (or misunderstanding) and communication.
 
           
 
* https://www.almanac.com/content/mercury-retrograde  
 
**Shopenhauer, Arthur, The Essays of Arthur Shopenhauer: The Art of Controversy.” Trans. T. Bailey Saunders, 1896. Online at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10731/pg10731-images.html
 
***In the first essay entitled “Preliminary: Logic and Dialectic.”

We don’t seem capable of avoiding conditions in agreements. Is it mistrust? I’m thinking that Shakespeare was wrong when he wrote, “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.”* How else explain the divorce rate? If it’s a matter of trust, then maybe Ringo Starr is more insightful than the Bard. After all, isn’t it he who sang about trust: “It don’t come easy”? In the middle of a litigious age, just about every agreement and commitment comes with caveats. Between and among individuals and nations, caveats and conditions dominate contracts; and they are there as safeguards of trust. “Yes, we agree on the condition that…” or, “Given this or that circumstance or corollary, we will cooperate in a mutual venture for….”
 
Adding caveats is nothing new, so I suspect that they are part of human makeup. But then that means we are “iffy”: “If you do (or don’t do) this, then I will….”  
 
And yet, there are people who freely make or take vows: Married couples, nuns, people facing dangers or seeming hopelessness in trenches both real and imagined. If Sister Milk of Magnesia can keep her vow sans caveats, why is it so difficult for so many others to keep theirs?
 
The good sister might be imbued with some special virtue most of us lack. Like everyone else, she has probably encountered “alterations” of various kinds. Whatever that “special virtue” is remains a mystery. One might argue that a nun essentially has a contract with herself—though she might argue it is with God—and that trusting oneself is easier than trusting another. With regard to those who impose so many restrictions, conditions, or peripherals on vows, contracts, and mutual agreements of any nature, one might guess that the idea of a caveat-free agreement never crosses the signatories’ minds. So much a part of human contracts or relationships for so long a time, caveats are here to stay, and few would enter into any agreement without the appropriate addenda of “ifs.”

​I wonder. Are "ifs" inborn or cultural? Are they genetic or learned?
 
When did you last enter into a commitment or agreement without the slightest caveat? When did you encounter an “alteration” that did not alter?
 
*Sonnet 116: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds.” 1609. Original: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments, loue is not loue/Which alters when it alteration findes…”
 
**Starr, Ringo, “It Don’t Come Easy.” 1971 (Had we learned something about trust and commitment in the 362 years between author and composer?)

Is www the vehicle by which a World Soul migrates? Certainly, it is one by which individual feelings and thoughts emigrate from one mind to cross penetrable barriers of other minds regardless of their physical location. And certainly, the migratory vehicle carries groups banding together for deeds both charitable and nefarious, groups responding to social media calls to gather for specific purposes and behaviors. Such, many would be sorry to say, is the mechanism by which modern terrorists and anarchists join in common causes, united as a communal Soul of Disruption, and such, many would be happy to say, is the same mechanism that transfers a communal Soul of the Good (or, at least, of the Well-meaning).
 
Nations and even empires of people have joined in such communal Souls as myrmidons loyal to some Achilles, individuals willing to join a cause. But even in the vast stretches of past empires vehicles like word-of-mouth or even the written word that carried a communal Soul could not match the carrying capacity of www and the numbers of individuals who board and ride it. Are we  transitioning from a world once composed of many souls to a world of a few communal ones?
 
We already know the dangers: Either/Or, Big Brother Thought Police, Matrices, Left/Right, Believer/Nonbeliever (or Heretic), and other imperatives. So, as you go a www-ing, be cautious. Some encompassing Soul, possibly one from the other side of the planet, might attempt to assimilate you.