Aubrey Lieberman Selected Poems and Essays

  Music Yo-yo Ma plays the cello for bison at Glacier National Park Glider pilots soar with hawks Gardeners tend their gardens This is the poetry  which really matters We are conscious empathic creatures bison and humans and all complex life forms The truth is that the birds and the buffaloes and the plants do not care about the strange behaviors of ambulant primates But without poetry and art and music we humans  are blind and numb and nothing matters While we live we are bound  to demonstrate our love for all that is life for the earth  and for the universe in all the ways that we are capable of This is the entanglement without which our hearts stop beating The question for the ages has always been and may always be why is there something  rather than nothing This is the answer Aubrey Lieberman 8/5/24

  We are they The propensity to empathize  is an evolutionary adaptation  mediated by our brains and bodies  enabling survival and procreation Empathy has valence although is generally assumed  to be good or positive  As empathic individuals we are able to understand the views of others and interact meaningfully  despite distinctive backgrounds  Empathy enables imagination A writer invents characters An actor may play many different roles A journalist may describe  a variety of experiences  and points of view  The essence of democracy  is the ability that all of us must possess in order to get along in order to avoid war and other destructive actions Our ability to empathize may underlie our ability to hold a variety of points of view in a variety of circumstances about an endless list of interests and concerns The complex adaptive machine that is the brain and the body in which it is enclosed has myriad of aptitudes a cornucop...

  Light in a box After Niels Bohr died, it was noted that there was a drawing of a box on a high corner of his blackboard, which was otherwise filled with equations. This reflected the long series of discussions he and Albert Einstein had had for many years, and the foundation of quantum mechanics. Einstein had died a few years before. The box represented Einstein’s box of light analogy at the core of their very enlightened agreements and disagreements. When I learned of this, I thought it would be nice to send somebody a gift, a box of light. I thought that I would fill it in a very bright room, and then close the lid quickly. I would have to do so in slight excess of the speed of light. As the weight of the lid would become infinitesimal, this would be a mission impossible. The alternative would be to capture a star in a very big box, which would be unwieldy, to say the least. The gamma rays would destroy the container anyway. Upon further reflection, I realized that the light in...

  From dust to dust If we knew everything absolutely everything  at a subatomic level there would be  no such thing as time Time emerges as a result of the blurring  based on intrinsic ignorance a consequence of  the macroscopic world  which we inhabit Time is the bonus  we must enjoy while we can while we are warm during our journey from  cold dust to cold again Aubrey Lieberman 2/15/24 

  Heated debate The entropic gradiant is a river flowing from a mountain of order, or high density of information, toward an ocean of lower informational density, or much lower order. The greater the the order, the more heat there is in the system.  This river flows from high order to low, losing heat in the process, which is the flow of time. The word entropy implies the opposite of order, high entropy characterizing the ocean in this analogy, low the mountain.  The choice of the term entropy was a learned or academic ploy that, as a consequence, entails an extra mental processing step each time we think about it. (Rudolf Clausius chose this term in 1865 from the Greek for ‘turning toward’). We should, perhaps, drop the term, as transition from order to disorder is more explicit.  However, I think that would be poetically unjust. Entropy is, after all, such a lovely word, and you would not be able to pretend to compliment somebody by congratulating them upon their h...

Free Will Awareness of choices made in a particular situation occur after a brief subconscious interval, the neurophysiology of which  can be recorded by monitoring alterations in the electromagnetic fields close to the brain, or by functional magnetic resonace imaging, before the individual becomes aware of a thought, impulse or the initiation of an action. This delay reflects the time necessary for a brain to recreate the user friendly interface, the screen which we refer to as consciousness. Some of what is manifest as brain physiology, comprehensible at the human level, is very slow compared to the nanosecond processing going on in the background. As a result, most of our “choices” are subliminal.  We are accustomed to thinking about choices as conscious or subconscious, but there is a timescale problem as alluded to, and behavior is always a result of activity in both domains.  In my view, the topic of free will is a perverse discussion. Subconscious processing is th...