Aubrey Lieberman Selected Poems and Essays

  Perspective We live in a cave called the universe, in a system of caves called the multiverse. From our cave we see the star closest to us during the day and the cluster we call the Milky Way, the galaxy in which our star is located, and other stars and galaxies, during earth's night. There are innumerable caverns in the earth's crust upon which we stand, the dimension in which we live, but the world beneath our feet is completely obscured. There are places where the separation from the surface is broken, where water and air and light penetrate. These are the worm holes through which people occasionally wander, into the dimension we call the underworld. Water and air flow far and long in this realm, but the light stops quickly. The metronome that is dripping water creates crystalline sculptures on a time scale where the word days has no meaning and night is permanent, where natural life has no need for eyes, and the word blind is irrelevant. It is human curiosity with carries...

Nothing is impossible  Natural processes are the result of natural systems and interactions without any need for consciousness or imagination. Changes are constant but variable, so systems and consequent interactions evolve in an unpredictable, continuously variable fashion. If the universe becomes static, the clock stops. Time does not exist in a true singularity. There are, similarly, no interactions, and thus no systems. In the absence of systems, interactions, space and time, there is nothing, no energy or matter, no phase or transition. Consciousness is not necessary at the fundamental level, but if present, will enable contemplation of all of this, while never influencing any of it in any way. When a conscious entity attempts to imagine nothing, it is trapped by the process, nailed to the virtual wall by ideas like empty space or zero, which is why consciousness annihilates nothing, the properties of which are no matter or energy or space or time, no what or where or when....

  Neoteny Neonate means newborn, so a persistent very youthful state would be reasonably termed 'neonateny', but neoteny is the dictionary word and will have to do. Evolution produced hardware by encoding chemical and physical structures first and then related behaviors.  Evolution recognized the inefficiency of this process, the incredible amount of time and energy required for one species to evolve to another. When learning appeared in the evolutionary process, adaptive changes occurred more rapidly, speeding up the process by orders of magnitude.  Learning was adopted in this way with now exponential gains, and the dominance of intelligent species, humans explicitly at the apex of this process. (There can be no apex without the base, the means by which the power of the sun and geogical processes are transformed into life, which is neccessary to sustain biologically based learning). We in turn, have recognized the potential of learning far more rapidly than we had been ...

  The happiness of horses Horses are amongst the most magnificent of the creatures sculpted by evolution, at least in our eyes, cherished for their beauty and companionship, and the work that they can do, and we still use their physical capacity as a measure of the power of our machines. A century ago in the United States, the horse population was about a fifth of the human population.  Measure for measure, each of us now utilize the power of a large pack of horses every day, without a thought about equine strength, prowess and beauty, or about the care living creatures require from us in return for the gifts they give. About a hundred years ago there were 106 million people and 27 million horses on our part of the continent, approximately 350 million people now and perhaps 6 million horses. It is safe to say that the extant horses are generally healthier and far less stressed than they were in the pre-industrial era, usually treated with affection and respect by their human o...

  Praying for time Often unintentionally  we invent or assume causal explanations  as components of our mental maps or models of the world meaning our worlds  and will often  continue to rely on them despite contradictory evidence Memes in this category are propagated far more rapidly than genetic information is by genes with a much higher  mutational propensity  and more likely for better or worse to be disseminated asexually in a relatively unconstrained manner Checks and balances of remarkable complexity  have evolved in biology  to enable survival and procreation  and play a similar role in civilizations  where they are far more mundane In the twenty first century  of the common era literacy and education  and access to information  are widespread and so is belief in mythology  Very few of us are physicists mathematicians molecular biologists  astronomers  cosmologists geologists evolutionary biolog...