Greetings readers. If you have ever clicked on the header “About the Ancient Mariner”, you will have discovered a blank page. This has lasted for years but at last he has repaired the text and it was a labyrinth of searches. It may help the reader understand this old duck.
Ancient Mariner
Mariner believes in group bonding as a key physiological behavior. It is a requirement to have a complete and, indeed, a happy life. Bonding is a real dimension of human existence without which there can be no comfort in the self and no gratification for the self.
Christmas is, for American society, a celebration of bonding. Like Thanksgiving, a celebration of harvesting, success and survival, Christmas is a celebration of harvested human social success, common beliefs, shared virtues of reciprocal support among family and community, and the joy of shared responsibility are but a few rewards we express at Christmas.
The most obvious expression experienced at Christmas is freely sharing one’s self by the giving of gifts and providing moral and material support between everyone.
Fortunately, mariner has had fulfilling Christmas experiences during his lifetime. His neighbors clear his driveway of snow; other neighbors gift his family with delicious food; his extended family raises the frequency of telephone and in-person visiting and enjoys reinforced bonding and emotional collaboration. He enjoys the deep feeling of bonding and sharing – and the only place to experience this needed feeling, is sharing and embracing a strong bond with others.
It needn’t be a large celebration with a lot of fanfare, it could be a simple act of going out of one’s way to show social bonding to another. For example, recently mariner (an old tar) was having great struggle trying to unload a heavy box from the car and carry it into the house. At that moment a stranger drove by, saw mariner’s plight, stopped his car and proceeded to carry the box to the house. Did mariner know this man? No. The stranger surely considered being a member of the community to be important and clearly exercised bonding that day.
Mariner’s Christmas wish to everyone is to reach out and embrace others. Bonding is a unique emotional experience. Bonding is a critical survival skill. Bonding is fun.
Ancient Mariner
Before mariner accepts AI as a new evolutionary species, he has a few questions.
1. If you have a humanoid house maid working in your home and you are dissatisfied with it’s attitude so you punch it in the face, will it punch back?
2. Will nursing humanoids compromise you then blackmail you?
3. When having guests for dinner, will the waitress badmouth you at the dinner table?
4. Will a humanoid borrow your credit card and send the balance of your bank account to another party?
5. Can a humanoid inherit your estate? Does a humanoid carry a gun?
6. Will a humanoid ignore mice and rats but kill your hamster?
7. Will a humanoid slip it’s hand up your spouse’s tee shirt?
8. Will a humanoid avoid picking you up at work because it couldn’t find the car keys?
If the answers to these questions are yes, AI is not a new species. If the answers are no, then we have a strange new creature in our midst. Will it dominate us?
Ancient Mariner
It is an unpleasant morning for mariner. Another fictitious Homo has been born in the new species, Homo fictitious: Tilly Norwood meet Solomon Ray. Solomon is your new associate in the entertainment business. Although you will never feel a heartbeat and you will never know of Solomon, we humans will think both of you will become friends – maybe even have a joint interview with a Homo fictitious journalist.
see https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-ai-plus-3f578c6c-b15f-4520-b015-ec13435e4b35.html?stream=top
Now a lonely sapiens has someone to call on the smartphone and talk about life and stuff, especially if sapiens needs to talk about Christian stuff.
It is within a lifetime that Homo sapiens won’t need other sapiens types. All that is needed is a smart TV, a smartphone and a computer already owned by the ‘cloud’.
So don’t buy that new EV auto, you won’t need one – but Tilly and Solomon might.
Hmm, has anyone actually seen and touched Taylor Swift? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have pets born in the Homo fictitious world? Although it may be difficult to walk and bathe them unless you breed yourself into the fictitious world. If you do, give us a ring on the smartphone; we’d like to keep up with how things are going.
Ancient Mariner
Like many of us, mariner keeps a neat and accessible office. One must acknowledge that cleaning an office is not a recyclable state of existence. It is more like a continuous evolution that never stops. While engaged in this ongoing process, mariner found a gem buried in one of the stored dump piles against the East wall. It is a conversation about humans offered by the great and famous Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996 – worth a search engine lookup). Spoken in the more innocent days of computerization during the 1970s, Carl is able to present the future without fear or avarice.
“… I think we’re constrained in how far we can go. Not by the scientific method; it seems to me the only reasonable approach, the one that confronts the data. Otherwise how would you ever know if a view were right or wrong? I think we’re constrained by our minds. Our minds are put together the way they are because of the needs of a very different sort of existence in which human beings evolved – a hunter/gatherer society – and now we’re asking that sort of brain to approach quite different circumstances.
It’s remarkable that it does as well as it does. The thing that I find astonishing is that we are able to invent simple rules and constructs which are able to predict quantitatively a wide range of natural phenomena. I mean, how is it that we can have one little simple equation which describes pretty closely how bodies fall, no matter where on earth they fall or where you throw them or what their shapes are. You know, it’s just a couple of little equations which are taught in high school physics. Why is the world put together in such a way that we are able to construct these little equations which explain such a wide variety of phenomena? That’s the astonishing thing.
The answer to that may be merely that things falling were pretty important to our ancestors, who lived in trees or something, so our minds evolved in such a way that things falling was something we had to understand. Those guys that couldn’t understand it all fell out of the trees and broke their necks. We’re not their descendants. We’re the descendants of the guys who could understand how things fell.”
It is time again, Carl. Humans will not be descendants of those who knew algebra and geometry, the new human will be one that lives in a static world where falling is unknown and hunting will become the ability to search reality simply by thinking about it.
Ancient Mariner
Elon Musk has begun funding GOP House and Senate campaigns for the 2026 midterms — an indication his relationship with President Trump has thawed since their messy breakup earlier this year, Axios’ Alex Isenstadt writes.
The tech billionaire recently cut big checks to help Republicans win congressional races next year and indicated he’d give more throughout the 2026 cycle, two sources with knowledge of the situation tell Axios.
Musk’s prejudice in favor of ‘party first’ and his ability to sway elections across the United States with massive, untracked money is antidemocratic, of course, and accelerates the nation toward an authoritarian plutocracy – Trump notwithstanding.
Mariner has been writing about ‘bottom up’ survival strategies to help the common citizen survive in undeniable disasters. He has spoken about having strongly bonded families and friends in case severe disaster occurs in politics or with the weather. Further, the network of government underwriting for health and education continues to fray; mariner has encouraged readers to be debt free.
To deal with a wayward government, the best strategies also are bottom up. They have been identified more clearly by Musk’s behavior, which brightly reflects a deep hole in government philosophy and administration. Regular readers will recognize these bottom up strategies:
Gerrymandering. Clearly the most abused practice in state and local elections. Election districts are drawn not to assure equal representation but just the opposite. Districts should be drawn from legitimate population statistics to assure every vote is only one equal vote. A good alternative is rank voting, which two states have adopted. [see posts Rank Voting Apr 2, 2022] The bottom up solution is to have a sense that you own your local representatives; elect candidates who support neutral selection of voting districts.
Campaign Finance. If elections truly are to be settled by district voters, a pure funding policy would go a long way toward that goal: Candidates can receive funding only from sources within that specific voter’s district. No outside funding permitted. The bottom up solution is to have a sense that you own your local representatives; elect candidates who support candidate funding only in your district.
Voter Identification. In every election there are complaints about the authenticity of a given vote. Agitators attack mailboxes, require constraints on mail-in ballots and early in-person voters. Even machines are accused of bias. All of these are attacks on process, not authenticity. Guaranteed authenticity can only be guaranteed by in-person voting with identification or by call-in with specifically unique identifiers. Using USPO mail boxes is subject to vandalism and will affect close races. Voting machines should pass a pre-election mathematical algorithm test to confirm accuracy. Bottom up, write to your local representatives asking for a guaranteed voter ID.
Voting is the most powerful tool a voter has to endorse their beliefs. Psychologically, it is as important a ritual as going to a church service or a professional sport event. Bottom up – care enough to visit your election polling center on election day.
Election Management. There are two aspects to election management: one is to assure that political parties don’t dismember legislated procedures, which is occurring in Florida and Texas where Governors and party leaders have sign off rights on Federal election representatives. The other is to elect appropriately matched representatives. Right now, both houses of Congress are run by old timers. It isn’t until we start electing Generation Z candidates that life experience knows something about reality. Bottom up – vote for younger candidates, maybe no older than 55.
We live at a moment when the entire planet is shifting our core reality as a species. Mariner has no idea what society will be like in 2050. Protect yourself with as many close, secure, emotionally dependable processes as you can.
Ancient Mariner
Mariner’s last post was a tongue-in-cheek consideration of how Jesus and flying reindeer fit together. Responder Ben said appropriately they don’t. But why do they remain related? Because faith is a deep-brain reasoning skill; because faith is an emotional base for our sense of worth; because faith will deliver hoped-for objectives; because faith is derived from memories and outcomes, not logic.
Humans use faith to define self value. A very clear example of this phenomenon are those individuals who have a deep faith in the importance of Donald Trump. Mariner has in his neighborhood four Trump believers. You cannot disparage his value in front of them; you cannot propose any logical thought that questions him; they immediately consider you ignorant and abusive; Trump believers have a deep-seated fear about the future that is largely instinctive but leaves their lives insecure in some way. They are known as the MAGA voters. They have faith that Trump is the prophet that can change the world and eliminate fear.
When used with conscious purpose, faith is a powerful emotional force that redefines right and wrong, truth and falseness, purpose and duty, in an effort to establish personal security and a sense of personal worth. These forces are rooted in the subconscious experiences of a lifetime. One can imagine many intellectual reasons for a faith through religion, psychology, sociology and physiology but faith is not an intellectual exercise. However, “Faith will make you whole”.
What binds Jesus, God, flying reindeer, Santa Claus and celebration is the common faith that the celebration, both holy and existential, represents a successful life and the experience of being saved by Grace – a happiness that will last a lifetime.
Ancient Mariner
Mariner’s town has about six inches of snow on the ground and single digit temperatures. Everything is motionless under a coat of icy snow. Churches were cancelled, not even driveways are cleared of the latest snow. To stand on the front porch is a quiet and still – and cold – experience! It is one of mariner’s daily jobs to get the mail from the PO box. But he told his wife his delivery service was closed, too.
Mariner has a wandering mind, always conjuring life and history in general. He is almost old enough to have met Jesus in person but not quite. He always wanted to ask Jesus about the December Christmas tree we use to celebrate his September birthday. I doubt fir and spruce trees even exist on the Arabian Peninsula.
Mariner acknowledges that the Christmas theme actually started with Santa Claus, a Christian bishop who lived around 300 AD in Turkey. He had a hobby of secretly giving gifts to the poor and needy. No, maybe mariner has it backwards – did Saint Nicholas live at the North Pole? No matter, whichever it was they had to live at the North Pole to find flying reindeer.
It is a distraction that Santa Clause has to break into homes by way of the chimney. That method certainly is a fire hazard. Do children without chimneys just miss out? Maybe he knocks on the door like UPS and scampers back to the reindeer.
Mariner has a grandchild about five or so who is confused when told Santa Clause is real but only if you believe so. If not, Santa doesn’t exist. But one can’t deny the plethora of celebratory activities throughout society.
So if he ever sees Jesus, he will ask him what he thinks about the December Christmas tree and Santa Claus.
Ancient Mariner
Thanks to Axios for this article.
If you’re close to your 9th, 32nd, 66th or 83rd birthday, you’re approaching one of four pivotal shifts in brain development.
Why it matters: The way our brains change throughout our lives isn’t linear. Instead, these four turning points divide life into five distinct phases. 🔬 Zoom in: During Phase 1 — ages 0–9 — brains are powerful but inefficient because we’re learning so much, from language to motor skills.
🖼️ Zoom out: We can’t control many aspects of how our brains age, but there’s a great deal we can control.
💰 Money quote: “There are pros and cons to every developmental stage,” Katie Insel, a psychologist at Northwestern, told the Post.
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Ancient Mariner
Our first fully intended, and fully human and fully placed in an artificial reality, has arrived. No, not Mickey Mouse. No, not Arnold Schwarzenegger. No, not Taylor Swift. Our new flame is one Tilly Norwood:
For all the details check out an interview on CBS.com
Tilly has her own AI set, an historical collection of backdrops and an AI cast as needed. One person writes script, finds cast and background and creates Tilly as the lead character. Barbie Doll hasn’t got a chance! Not even a physical, three-dimensional, conversational sex doll like Lucy has a chance.
Readers could easily accept her alongside all the other TV stars on television, smartphone and laptop. The difference is that about 500 paid artisans aren’t needed. Get hold of Donald, he has new group of folks he can extradite.to reduce health costs and Social Security.
I fear the day when my doctor is replaced with a TV screen. At the least, his replacement should be as attractive as Tilly. When women went to the hairdresser, who would they talk to? Wouldn’t it be scary if the AI hairdresser asked you about some embarrassing event from your past that had been forgotten but still available from Google? What if there were only one or two hair styles available?
Mariner jests to a point. The real point is that the worker class is about to be dispersed in a way no one can guess. Mariner continually advises readers to aim to be debt free and have a supportive family that can help carry the reader through hard times.
Ancient Mariner