Way back in 1996 — almost 30 years ago! — I wrote a paper called Consciousness As An Active Force. It became the seed from which my book Active Consciousness (2011) grew. The paper talked about the common desire of AI researchers of that time to create a machine or at least a program that…
Personal Reflections Posts
Finding America
When my husband Steve and I embarked on our first voyage across America in September 2021, we thought we were merely looking for a new place to spend our summers, given that we could no longer go to our usual haunts in Canada. But within just a day after leaving California (as I described in…
What Happened to Silicon Valley?
It’s been about a year since I posted my last article, “Looking for America.” Steve and I did finally find our new homeland. We moved to South Carolina in September 2022, arriving for good at our new home exactly one year, to the day, after we originally left on our first voyage of discovery in…
Looking for America
Let us be lovers We'll marry our fortunes together.. And (we) walked off To look for America — from "America" – Paul Simon On September 18, 2021, my husband Steve and I loaded up our Prius and its new roof box with three suitcases, two backpacks, three shopping bags, two duffel bags, a laundry basket,…
What Is Liberation?
It seems like everyone these days is thinking about liberty. Here in the US, people were feeling so much freer after various COVID restrictions were removed in June and July. Now the clamps are coming down again, with all the fears about the delta variant and emerging talk about vaccine mandates and passports. We may…
Something Is Definitely Not As It Seems
It’s been a while since I’ve written, mostly because I’ve been rather flummoxed over the past few months and didn’t know what to say. Doesn’t it seem like we’re all living in some kind of strange dream? I feel like we’re floating in unknown waters with our heads above the surface, trying to pretend that…
Unraveling the Vaccine Debate: Finding the Fulcrum Beneath Polarity
Many of us are growing to realize the dangers inherent in the increasing polarities in our world. Polarity is all about two camps fighting one another on two sides of an issue, each side “othering” and dehumanizing the other as an enemy to be vanquished at all costs. Of course, polarities have likely plagued humanity…
The Power of Uncertainty
If there’s one thing that COVID-times have brought us, it’s uncertainty. We wake up each morning wondering what unexpected changes are coming our way. Will there be work, will there be school, will there be money? Will we or our loved ones become sick or well? What governmental regulations will be imposed or lifted? Will…
How Much Is Too Much?
How much is too much? That seems to be a question that keeps coming up these days, in one form or another. How much surveillance is too much surveillance? How much money is too much money? How many immigrants are too many immigrants? How much state control is too much state control? How much freedom…
Where There’s Fire There’s Smoke
Greetings from California and the West Coast of the United States, land of fire and smoke. Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse, those of us living in this part of the world have been visited by, first, unbelievable hot spells, then extremely rare lightning storms, and then rampant and huge fires accompanied by…