is there anybody out there?

 communication's hopeless from the start

if I can't prove that you exist at all
and our most elevated heart-to-heart
might just as well be murmured to a wall
deductively, I only know "je suis"
there may be no reality "out there"
if universe could end with "I", not "we"
we're solipsists adrift on unseen air
or each of us Narcissus at his pond
enamored of the visage we project
desiring someone else with whom to bond
or--minimally--someone to reject
to function, we become willfully blind
insisting we can know another's mind

the royal writ

Eight legs lent Sleipnir traction on the snow;

it wouldn't do for Odin to get stuck.
The Roman fashion, building cobbled roads,
would need a labor force that gave a fuck.
Heroic architecture's rare, of course,
Reliant as it is on taxing funds.
No king could build such things of he were Norse;
what one boat's crew can't do, did not get done.
The Book of Judges shills for monarchy
to tax, and underwrite as may seem good.
Portraying tribal life as anarchy,
where individuals did as they would.
Each libertarian needs all-wheel-drive
where workers don't contribute to the hive.

the real thing

Wolf-Sauron met the Hound of Valinor;
sham canine pitted 'gainst the Jaws of Steel.
Despite the form, he's plastic at the core,
while Huan--Platonically--is quite surreal.
By special dispensation, a pure Form--
sent hither to the lands of Middle earth--
for newfoundland or whippet set the norm,
however one would measure a dog's worth.
A Craftsman schooled in Aule's atelier,
ambitious for dominion over Men,
where others have a spine, there's only clay,
to fashion a new face each day again.
Faux wolf shifts shape to flee on vampire wings
unable to contend with the real thing.

pseudoscience

Karl Popper irked bad Marxists who resent
The 'Pseudoscience' label they'd well earned.
Uncomprehending everything he'd meant
But pretty sure that--somehow--they'd been burned.
When data contradict their sacred texts
they piously insist the facts ain't right;
what tends to falsify, they just reject.
Where others would rethink, they're prone to fight.
The Jungians--if anything--fare worse
No myth he'd once found useful could be bad!
With Freudians, they bear Karl Popper's curse.
And--is it rude to note?--their seer was mad.
Believers swallow scripture as 'just so'
where scientists weigh what it means to know.

apparition

Pink clouds of cherry blossoms levitate
upon a sea in countless shades of green
a challenge for the mind to contemplate
within three pounds of squishy wet machine.
If clouds wax pink, why need a sky be blue?
and must your lexicon comport with mine?
The frequencies reflected set the hue,
but conversation's tinted by each mind.
The qualium evoked when you see "red"
might differ from what I call by that name.
I can't know what goes on inside your head,
'though lazily, I treat the two the same.
A vernal contemplation en pleine air
is pretty, 'though I can't be sure what's there.

values

Takata found a way to save a buck 
replacing airbags' sodium azide.
The boardroom cheered; they couldn't give a fuck
'til courts had proved how many people died.
Shareholders' profit's not the only good
a corporation ought to optimize.
As "persons" they must share our neighborhood
and "good" is what has value in our eyes.
Milt Friedman ran Chicago off the rails
defining "ethics" he could quantitate.
But when executives serve time in jail
society may re-evaluate.
Amoral spreadsheets just provide a tool;
to idolize them, one would be a fool.

project Europe

What Hobbes described, Kant would extrapolate.
The boons man finds within Leviathan
accrue--writ large--if each and every State
would take the yoke of something larger on.
The Book of Judges sketched it long before,
a tribal world of shocking violence
and looming over all the threat of war
for want of any global governance.
But dogs smell opportunity in strife
to sell munitions while their brothers bleed.
No values guide their actions in this life
beyond their all-consuming mortal greed.
Where each does what seems good in his own eyes
we're evermore condemned to balkanize.

exceptional

Recursions gave mishnaic rabbis pause;
such questions without answers just seemed wrong!
They sought a cosmos run by causal laws.
And so, they posit the first pair of tongs.
Created erev shabbos the first Week
to be discovered by a BronzeAge sage.
Full 14 billion years, word didn't leak
'til they're appropriate to Mankind's age.
Ten miracles, the text enumerates
that scientists are helpless to explain.
The manna, talking ass, or Korach's fate...
the best logicians spend their ink in vain.
Balaam's ass kept exalted company;
Jews hate exceptions to causality.

simplistic

Brett Kavanaugh's the darling of the Right
who'll holler "murder!" if one would abort
a brain-dead fetus ere it see the light.
A monstrous misfit for our highest court.
When life begins' not easy to define;
philosophers--if wholly honest--can't
show legislators any clear bright line,
since most conceptions fail, and don't implant.
Each pregnant teen must live with the effects
of getting raped, and bear the public shame.
But Brett smirks at his own coercive sex;
in his world, only victims carry blame.
McConnell's fealty to Trump's complete
if he delivers one more stolen seat.

ya know?

Holistic types disdain to analyze
like seeing doesn't need them to mentate.
A world--not in the mind--but in the eyes
would leave the spirit free to meditate.
As if reality were common fare,
plunked down upon the plank at which we dined
full-formed, and uncontentiously "out there"
and not constructed in each thinker's mind.
Descartes made clear, four centuries ago
this murky matter of "reality"
how precious little one can strictly know
despite our fondest quest for certainty.
For bedrock rules on which all life depends,
reductionism's how one comprehends.

b'reishit N

A serpent guards that garden in the East
where we could picnic, free from thorns, and ants.
Until, conversing with that subtle beast,
we found a need for modesty, and pants.
Uncounted worlds of angels, singing praise,
left Him unsatisfied, and oddly bored.
So our account conceives, in seven days
a "very good" device to please the Lord.
The Tree of Knowledge let God off the hook.
Without freewill, He can't be wholly good.
Theodicy's there in the op'ning book.
It's we that chose to not do as we should.
Let theologians categorize sin;
morality, like God, must dwell within.

Noach II

Each clockwork cosmos, pure, and fair, and just
was found deficient; none could clear the rod.
And yet this compromise, wrought from their dust,
proved somehow satisfactory to God.
Free-will lets monotheists off the hook.
Although there's Evil, God can still be good.
While revelation's there in His good book,
it's willful man that won't act as he should.
The line of Adam must ride out the storms
although our violence screams to the skies,
to build again society, and norms
where no one does what's good in his own eyes.
Repackaged Gilgamesh, and snakes, and mud
lay ethics on old stories of the Flood.

b'reishit N

FirstLight, created ere the moon, or sun
was stored away--for those who can--to find
each spark redeemed, a sacred battle won
perceived not with the eyes, but with the mind.
The written word made history's first mark
preserving poetry of those who'd died
sustaining what might gutter in the dark;
what had been deep could also, now, grow wide.
But is it metaphor? Or the BigBang?
black-body of a cosmos screaming hot?
A pre-galactic, thermal birthing pang.
Perhaps we'd better read it as p'shat.
FirstLight could cast no shadows in our cave
'til Wilson thought to look in microwave.

Olam haBah

the "Open Secret" Wolfson won't explain
is there for those with sitzfleisch to discern.
Vain author! treats his readers with disdain
defying them to persevere and learn.
The deuteronomistic quid pro quo
describes a world where justice pure gets done
a fiction, where perhaps we'd like to go
but manifestly foreign to this one.
The Book of Daniel innovates reward
that no one heard at Sinai where we stood
a stiff-necked people took commandment hard
expecting blessings (were we to be good).
The spark is consubstantial with the Whole;
Our God's the integral of human soul.

Hume II

Hume knew there's none to watch Descartes' stage-set
homunculi recurse in futile chains.
Two hundred years before a neural-net
he grasped the problems such a thing explains.
No test will prove the soul John Searle long sought
there's nothing indivisible to find
determinate as digits 'one' and 'nought'
dumb parts add up to constitute a mind.
As sure as Turing's universal host
there is no little man behind the screen
Searle hunts in vain for his Cartesian ghost
for want of faith in Darwin's wet machine.
The consciousness that tells me that "je suis"

emerges as an abstract entity

Give me but a place to stand...

Hume knew there's none to watch Descartes' stage-set
homunculi recurse in futile chains
two hundred years before a neural-net
he grasped the problems such a thing explains.
No test will prove the soul John Searle long sought
there's nothing indivisible to find
determinate as digits 'one' and 'nought'
dumb parts add up to constitute a mind.
As sure as Turing's universal host
there is no little man behind the screen
Searle hunts in vain for his Cartesian ghost
for want of faith in Darwin's wet machine.
The consciousness that tells me I'm a fact
'though reified, remains a thing abstract.

res cogitans

sir Francis Crick spent decades chasing "mind"
a physicist outstanding in his mode
while Dennett claim's there's no such thing to find
we're emulators, running Darwin's code.
Emergent properties that fooled Descartes
in Dennett's view, may not exist at all.
To reify a "mind" like "brain", or "heart"
kept theorists pent in a fictive wall.
Each unit neuron seems determinate
a switch that throws as ions go, and  come 
but what emerges in the aggregate
subjectively, seem more than naught-or-one.
'Though Consciousness assures me that "je suis"
that anchor's dangling in the deep blue sea.

Why not?

Causality's a figment in your head
the meta-tool on which the rest depend
inhabiting a "now" to which "past" "led".
We're over-quick to think we comprehend.
Frail daisy-chain links 'after' to 'before',
induction builds the cosmos we discern
but we delude ourselves to think it's more
than Turing's robot feigning it can 'learn'.
Imputing agency avoids some threats;
what rustles in the grass might be a beast.
Darwinian selection pays those bets
who flees the quickest get devoured the least.
It's human to presume that we are wise
but most of what we 'know' are our own lies.

ghost in the machine

John Searle's essentialism is his bind
he'll never find that last homunculus
he'd rather keep the student body blind
than cede he's been the wrongest one of us
Dan Dennett knows the parts comprise the whole
the only way to mind is through the brain
what Searle can't find is nothing but a soul
to search for which through science is insane
Spinoza saw for everything, one cause
what's immaterial's not our concern
the marvel is that Nature's bound by laws
that humans--with due diligence--can learn
the cosmos is less spooky that it seems
demystified by culture built of memes

Shannon Entropy

I dreamed that you could understand the code that I'd devised
devoid of ambiguity as plain as broad daylight
and anyone who heard or read could look out through my eyes
a sweet, seductive fantasy that helped me sleep at night
I rushed to put it down in ink the moment I awoke
but trains of baggage came along with every word I chose
the clarity was the mirage, and all I clutched was smoke
that through my fingers oozed away and to the stars arose
Retreat! Retrench! at least in math, we share communion pure
that isn't just conventional, transparent to us all

but Gödel interjects to say I must not be so sure

an edifice on such a base in time may also fall
self-organized, dream-words conform to heptametric verse
so somewhere, entropy must grow, within my universe