Aubrey Lieberman Selected Poems and Essays

  Hear Ye Excuse me but I have to put on my hearing aids and go out into the world I have to listen to all sides of every story while I can still hear my heartbeat I have to listen to all that surrounds me to all that surrounds the earth the solar system the galaxy the universe and the multiverse I have to see and smell and taste and feel all of the forces which enable life And when I return  I will listen again  to the voice of the person standing next to me to all the voices of all of the people and all of the creatures and of all creations And if I don't my heart will stop beating Aubrey Lieberman  6/15/25

  Sticky Mittens   Developmental psychologists have put sticky mittens on baby hands, with which the tiny humans were able to grasp much more effectively, enabling them to do things they were previously thought to be incapable of. The researchers concluded that neural connectivity during early life exceeded the physical constraints imposed by the little hands. A human adult given sticky mittens, might climb a skyscraper, given wings, fly like a bird, given scuba gear, swim like a fish, given a telescope, explore the galaxies, given a microscope, enter the earths microbiome, given vibrating strings, makes celestial music, given a board and chalk, write the equations which govern life and the universe. Human general intelligence is the sticky mitten which enables us to grasp almost anything, even to make tools to enhance our intelligence beyond the limits we can imagine now. Perhaps we will collectively become smart enough to escape our evolutionary constraints, enabling kindnes...

  Ocean 2.0 The point of no return is a concept in evolutionary biology. For example, orcas and dolphins will never return to land.  I think humans have also "PONRed" and will never return to a natural state, as we are now fully integrated with our tools. The tools are our ocean. We will continue to evolve much more rapidly than biological evolution as a result of technological evolution, just as we leapt away from ordinary evolution as a result of cultural evolution.  Evolutionary history on earth is characterized by evolution without intentional direction by the evolving organisms.  Our evolution going forward might be managed completely by the evolving organism, the human being of the current era, unless the tools we produce evolve technologically enough to supersede human management of the human-tool    evolutionary process of the future. Aubrey Lieberman  5/30/25 Attribution: my Google news feed 

  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...