My old Webster’s dictionary (1960) does not even list the term “software” in its entries. As recently as 50 years ago in the “development” or apparent evolution of man the concept was not widely known.

Today millions of us use software, and many humans are even well versed in the concept of “programming” – designing or directing a series of symbols to perform intended tasks using electricity and silicon.

At the same time another industry is using the most powerful computers on the planet to decode the complex set of instructions in our genetic code – the genome. It has discovered not that the genetic code is “like” software (an analogy) – but that it is in fact exactly that. Genticist Juan Enriquez has stipulated that organic life is literally an “application” – behaving according to a programmed set of instructions in its DNA.

While we still cannot create life (although scientists predict it will happen) we can reprogram it.

Here an interesting puzzle is presented.

Could software have come into existence without man – or at least intelligent life? Hardly. It is difficult to imagine software appearing in an inanimate, mechanical universe devoid of life and intelligence. Clearly in a world without humans (or intelligent life) there would be no technology.

But if Life is actually software – programmed intentionality in organic matter – is it reasonable to think that it could have “evolved” out of inanimate, mechanical stuff?

Certainly the implications are troubling – wherever the original intention behind Life’s programming – whatever its ultimate “source” – what might have created or caused that? An infinite paradox for theologians, scientists and seekers.

But the problem may not be the paradox, but the language framing it.

In posing this puzzle, we assume a level of linear causality that we have recently discovered may be entirely missing in another area of scientific inquiry – quantum physics.

Without stooping to the level of simplicity that says that all physical law is “mental” or connected to the observer or consciousness at the subatomic level (which is hard to fathom much less explain intelligently) – although it can be “felt” –

...we may nonetheless also “feel” the possibility that if our own “nature” is in fact decodable based on a set of symbols (numbers, letters, zeroes, ones), then concepts of reality pointing to the primacy of Mind over Matter – which are the basis of many ancient teachings – may be onto something very deep and true.

The decoding of the genome, for example, points quite directly to a “meaning” and “intention” in our Being – first survival – then replication – and perhaps ultimately – what? Evolution or transformation?

The development of software is a double edged sword. On the one hand it provides the potential for unparalleled control over humanity in a 1984-like scenario. What some may term degeneration of free will or involution.

On the other, it points the way toward a different level of meaning. By introducing the concept and the actual experience of an “application” – something artificial (man made) that performs intended tasks according to a [human] mental directive – an electronic being – based on human intelligence and intention – it shows how mind can shape materiality in a direct way. How a mind can exist through electrical impulses and silicon to perform intelligent, intended tasks on the human scale.

One may well ask, on what scale or in what realm of creative mental space might whatever have placed the intention or meaning within Life – our genetic code – exist?

It (God, She, He) need not exist on a material level at all. We experience the realm of thought within whatever software coexists in the operating system of our brains.

Might not a living, sentient level of thought be galvanizing the material realm, and Life on our planet, for purposes that we can barely fathom and are at a loss to explain with our feeble logic?

I haven't posted in a while - one reason being that maintaining my Vista "home network" is such a joy. It goes out willy nilly for no apparent reason, keeping me from moving files, accessing the web, or both.


This weekend I spent an hour resetting the network instead of watching basketball - the key point to remember is when this happens - nothing has changed - it just stops working.

Finally I decided to go thru the Vista web site and try to find explanations to some of my "issues" - amazingly the duplicate IP address came up as a common problem with an apparent solution - which I clicked on -- mind you this is from the Vista web site --

Forget about the inscrutable text - note the "relevant" Applies to section - it's all about Windows NT and 3.11! From the Vista web site!

Can there be any clearer testimony that this company does NOTHING to increase the stability of its product from iteration to iteration? I don't need the AERO interface - I need a networking infrastructure that WORKS CONSISTENTLY - even on Sunday morning when I want to watch basketball.

Here is a clue - if the network is working Saturday night and I DO NOTHING - it should still be working Sunday morning.

Moreover, is it too much to expect, as a home business user, that in the decades since Windows 3.11, or the five years since the initial post of this "knowledge base" article - that Microsoft might deign to actually fix the problem if IP conflicts - and perhaps make the fix transparent to the user.

...Or - failing that - at least clearly explain what the heck an DHCP server even is -- is that too much to ask?!?!

Instead they concentrate on new "features" - leaving a hole in a service that every business or even home user has a right to expect will work and perform stably.

Could a problem be the router? Of course -- since Vista needs all kinds of hardware and software upgrades to work properly.

I also saw a link for a listing of Vista supported Routers - great, another peripheral I need to upgrade for no reason. But I ran the diagnostics for my older router in Vista and it passed - so that is not the reason for my problems.

Finally, the symptom of my problem (which is nowhere covered in the Vista web pages even in the section on Win 3.11) is the sudden appearance of a duplicate network. This requires me to get rid of it by restarting my network adapter. Doubtless Windows tech support would inform me that this is a "hardware" issue -- but let's face it -- if they haven't solved the IP conflict issue since Windows 3.11 then apparently the modus operandi of making excuses instead of creating a stable working environment is not going anywhere any time soon.

Technology is often considered an indicator of the evolution of humanity, freeing it of many physical struggles and evidencing the progress of the species.

But if we grant that the essential nature of man (and woman) has not changed much in thousands of years, could the meaning implicit in technology not also be a catalyst for more profound level of evolution?

What if technology is a teaching?

Jacob Needleman, in his book “A Sense of the Cosmos”, suggests that the outer world (the physical world and the universe) is considered within many ancient religions to be the lever for the transformation of human beings from unconscious to conscious.

How might technology, as 21st century humans experience it, be instrumental in that process?

From personal experience I resisted technology early in life. As an English major I had disdain for the engineers on my college campus who had multiple pens in their breast pockets and merely tabulated, calculated and later collected sizable salaries.

Later in life I had occasion to have a number of significant experiences.

First in my reading I became fascinated by theories that the ancient Egyptians (or perhaps others who had visited Egypt) had encoded mathematical principles of the highest order in the pyramids and other ancient structures.

These structures were also speculated to have been temples (not in the modern sense) of initiation, where human consciousness might have been transformed to a higher level.

I intuitively appreciated how mathematics – the simple perfection of absolute Law (2+2=4 must be true everywhere and anywhere) might somehow be connected to such higher consciousness. On the physical plane such perfection is barely possible – exact measurement is rarely achieved – although the architects of the pyramids certainly came closer than many modern builders.
Then later in life I became fascinated by computers. My first experience was with a series of disks programmed into an IBM work processor that “taught” me how to use it.

Later I loved the process of teaching myself new “programs” – essentially active verbs or possibly even virtual life forms within the silicon that could do things and accomplish amazing feats of calculation and even graphics.

Occasionally I would hit a glitch and something “would not work.” When I was able to solve the problem it often happened that the computer had been “right” – whoever had designed the program had programmed according to a logic or math that I had not grasped – with which I was out of tune.

This alerted me to the possibility of higher impersonal intelligence. What was right was not morally right in the normal sense of the term, but rather correct in its alignment with principles of which I was yet unaware.

Becoming aware was literally enlightenment.

Now as I struggle with the meaning of my own waning physical existence I have become exposed to teachings that take a similar view of the cosmos.

They interpret the teachings of sages like Jesus, Buddha and others as not teaching insights in line with a higher personal Creator or God, but rather being in line with Nature or Life’s innate higher intelligence, as Eckart Tolle writes so eloquently in "A New Earth."

As “modern” beings we are not likely to understand the notion of physical objects as intelligent.

But what about energy?

What do we truly understand about the nature of energy?

We know that electricity is in our brains as impulses of our own thought. And we have now programmed similar electrical impulses

We know that unimaginable bursts of energy emanate through the universe and from stars like our sun.

Astronomers have speculated that remnants of the Big Bang (perhaps the first real conscious event that initiated all evolution of consciousness) still resonate throughout the universe.

If one broaches the subject of higher intelligence today the label one is given is a proponent of Intelligent Design, which is usually a front for institutional or evangelical Christianity as proof of a personal and angry or beneficent deity.

But there is a reasonable alternative – one that is being approached in science at the molecular and interstellar level.

I have written that my problems with religion began with the horrific experiences of my parents in the holocaust. My mother lost her faith while my father attributed his survival to his beliefs.

I can now take a new perspective on my father’s point of view. One winter we went to services for Yom Kippur at a congregation where we were not members. We were sent to the basement and all during the service, piped into a cramped room on speakers, we were solicited for cash.

My father left very angry, and later in life when he retired he avoided synagogues saying instead that he can commune with God just as well at sunset by the ocean.

While he never lost his belief in an anthropomorphic deity, I believe that he sensed a connection to nature and Life, based on his experiences, and of an intelligence and power of a much higher order and sought solace by connecting to it intuitively.

Technology shows us that logic and mathematics are of that higher order – they approach perfection in their certitude and also point to the inevitable fallibility of human nature.

Technology shows the potential presence of increasingly complex systems which our own ego driven and emotional natures can only dimly comprehend.

If you don’t believe this, watch the video of geneticist Juan Enriquez on the TED web site that explains how life behaves like a computer application, executing its genetic code with exquisite perfection and according to predictable mathematical principles. Of course, the ultimate complexity and level of these principles is still a mystery and withheld from our knowledge, and the subject of continued scientific inquiry.

It goes back to the experience of not understanding something about a computer but when the mystery is solved, realizing that the solution points to a system of logic that makes complete sense when understood from a perspective different, and perhaps far more advanced, than our own limited intelligence.

Ultimately technology, logic and mathematics point the way to the inevitability that life has meaning on a scale well beyond our own level of existence - where things may make sense in ways that humans cannot understand without evolving from their present state of inhumanity.

Last Friday I attended the premiere of "Burning the Future", a documentary with which an old friend is associated that provides a disturbing overview of how corporations are raping the environment of West Virginia, Kentucky and other states by cutting off the tops of entire mountains and destroying the land, killing wildlife, and poisoning the water. Here is the trailer:



This harkens back to an earlier blog entry speculating that corporations are literally the dominant life forms on the planet. That they are also predatory is no longer in question, as this film shows -- the big problem is that since they are basically etherial and virtual life forms they permit their human components to function without conscience.

Interestingly these life forms worship science and materialism as the highest value, so that their efforts induce their human components to act in a way that is pro-science, and against their conscience. The quality of conscience has atrophied in the "humans" that speak and act on behalf of these corporate monstrosities.

Unfortunately their actions also affect the livelihoods and lifestyles of millions of other humans, who must turn off their consciences in order to go along with the choices that these corporations manifest and promote through the corporately controlled mass media.

In the Q&A following the premiere the film maker made a point that in all of the CNN debates among candidates this issue was never raised, and even global warming was barely mentioned and never addressed with specificity (as a result of coal mining, for example). At the same time "Clean Coal" was a major sponsor of the debates.

Finally it is my view that the most imminent ecological disaster facing humans and all life on the planet currently has not been addressed with any sense of alarm since the days of Jacques Cousteau. The pollution and death of our oceans is almost certainly a condition from which our species will never recover and is no longer a matter of conjecture or debate. The fact that our beaches are spoiled is the least of our problems. When the reefs and sea lifeforms are dead we will starve and perhaps most profoundly higher life forms (cetaceans) will also become extinct.

Life will go on but homo sapiens may not survive. There may be some justice in that, since it is homo sapiens who triggered the evolution of the corporation -- basically a soul-less entity that is having disastrous effects on all life on this planet.

(Please see "Thoughts on the Holocaust" - February 11, 2008 in Archive)

It may well be as some have speculated that corporations and other similar institutions are harbingers of our (de)evolution into less conscious life forms like ants and bees whose identity is no longer individualized but manifest in a hive or colony.

Perhaps that is what Life has in store for us because of the threat we pose, in our corporate and institutional structures, to the totality of life on earth.

While we may see technology and the Internet, for example, as evolutionary quantum leaps forward, to the extent that they enable the continued atrophy of individual conscience and compassion, these aspects of "progress" may well result not in human empowerment, but in the control of the masses by the most venal and power hungry among us.

If that happens, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Since 9-11 it is commonly asserted that fundamentalist Muslims have “hijacked” their religion from presumably more reasonable and mainstream believers in their faith.

Anyone who has followed the news in science recently might say exactly the same thing about the concept of Intelligent Design, and once again the culprits are fundamentalists who have co-opted a set of beliefs, in this case scientific findings, to virulently promote their own narrow interpretation.

Particularly in the fields of quantum physics and genetics, there is an increasing awareness on the part of scientists that natural phenomena cannot be explained or predicted without taking into account the presence of an underlying mental component. Heisenberg and even Einstein first introduced these concepts in physics; in genetics the implications are more subtle.

We are increasingly told about the genetic code; the genome (which is the code underlying an individual or species) has been sequenced (interpreted as a series of alphabetic letters) and at the TED conference in Monterey last year, geneticist Juan Enriquez described the apple as “an application.” When it receives enough energy from the sun the apple “executes” its code (just like a computer program) and falls from a tree.

If you’ve ever worked with computers you’ve had an experience that points to what this means (and I acknowledge that scientists are uncomfortable with the notion of meaning). You’re working on a new computer program or application, or even installing a peripheral, and it doesn’t work. You reread the manual or maybe even call a help desk, and the problem gets solved – and here’s what happens: You realize that the computer was right.

What you then realize is the device or the program functioned exactly as it was supposed to, but you misunderstood something in the instructions. The malfunction was not some random event – when you understand it from a higher perspective it makes total sense from the vantage point of your new understanding. When you can align yourself with the system that conceived the program or device, suddenly everything about the incident becomes clear – it is no longer seemingly random – it is the obvious result of comprehensible intelligence.

This is precisely the current predicament of science. As it tries to decipher nature its findings are incomplete, but in every nook and cranny they point to something unmistakable – previously the province of mystics and pantheistic religions – there is an unmistakable order, a plan and symmetry at work in nature.

But when they venture forth with these findings the results are not pretty.

Ben Stein is addressing this issue in an upcoming film, “Expelled the Movie”, in which he asserts that scientists who question some of the theories of Darwin are being expelled from universities and ostracized by their peers for being religious kooks. This is of course a frightening prospect; if findings can be empirically verified they should be allowed into science and if alternatives to Darwin’s theories are rational they should be taught.

But it’s a false conundrum. The problem isn’t Darwinism or even Evolution – it’s the issue of what originally started the ball rolling. Strict scientists believe that random acts like lightening could have triggered evolution and hence life is a random event with no meaning or mental component at work. Mystery solved.

But is it? Some geneticists claim they are years away from creating life in a test tube – but have they? It seems so far they have only created one life form from another.

If their scientific colleagues who are brushing up against the evidence of paradox in the form of a mental or intelligent component at work in nature are being unfairly banished from their positions as scientists, that is an absurdity that results from only one thing – the fact that this concept which is entirely legitimate for scientific exploration has been hijacked by fundamentalists in this country.

They want Intelligent Design taught in schools as a theory of the existence of God – essentially an anthropomorphic construct with obvious problems. We do not know anything about the existence of a God, much less which God is the right one, or what His or Her motives may be.

But we cannot allow earnest scientific investigation into a mental component of nature to be torpedoed by such a fundamentalist interpretation when it may yield immense breakthroughs in the area of medicine, space exploration and fields as yet unforeseen.

The finite human mind seems incapable of accepting an effect without a cause, and yet science is coming up against that paradox inside the atom and at the edge of the known universe. Scientists like Mani Bhaumik, inventor of Lasik and author of “Code Name God” have already begun to compare and even reconcile findings in their fields with ancient religious theories – but totally within the context of accepted scientific discovery. But such scientists do not necessarily contend, and in fact Bhaumik would surely not believe, that locating the presence of intelligence in nature proves that the earth was created in less than a week, or that a puppet master was pulling the strings in the universe or directing the lives of individuals on this planet.

Freeing ourselves from the constraints of this dichotomy, between limiting the scope of scientific inquiry or accepting beliefs based only on faith, is very likely a key to the next great quantum (pardon the pun) leaps in both science and health and we must grant our greatest minds the freedom to explore nature in its fullness, even if it leads to the conclusion that far greater minds exist.

Video of my mother's recollections from her unpublished memoir,
"The Next Chapter." Her focus is not only the Holocaust, but the psychological toll of trying to readapt to a "normal" society. She also speculates about the Nazis' use of mind control and experiments in psychological terrorism on captives.
Mind games, returning to a hostile home, and reflections on God.