User:Bioengineer

About me
Rev. J. Brian Harris, Ph.D., P.E., Wisconsin Registered Professional Engineer No. 34106

Doctoral Dissertation: "Mental Health and Mental Illness: Cause, Purpose, Cure, and Prevention; A Bioengineering Perspective" (University of Illinois at Chicago, 1998).

Rev.? Because engineers are not accorded privileged communication as are physicians, psychologists, or attorneys-at-law, and because I found it necessary to be able to talk with people within the safety of privileged communication to do the research I continue to do, I decided to follow in my dad's and his parents' footsteps and become a member of the ordained clergy. I am ordained as a member of the clergy by World Christianship Ministries, and do pastoral counseling ministry as Affirmational Faith Ministry. Please take careful note that Affirmational Faith Ministry is not allied to or affiliated with any particular sect or any particular religion, as I experience existence as being of evolving creativity such that all of existence is of the actual and ultimate unity of diversity.

Ultimate unity of diversity? I was a physics major at Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, for three years prior to transferring to the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle to study bioengineering. At Carleton, one of my professors was Ian G. Barbour, then Professor of Religion and Physics. I did not garner the mathematical skills needed to plausibly begin to unfathom the relationship(s) between quantum mechanics and biology until I was well through my graduate school courses.While most of what I have read about quantum mechanics leads me to think that many people who study quantum mechanics deem it to apply only to what is very, very small, I have found that the whole of existence, at any and every scale of observation, is understandable to me only within a quantum mechanical view. To me, it is as though the whole of the universe (including all possible parallel universes) is like a singularity, were it to be viewed from outside itself. Were I to give that singularity a name, I would call it "now." I find that "now" has to change, or it could not be here at all. Nor, methinks, would "here" be here?

Evolving creativity? The late Walter M. Elsasser was a Johns Hopkins physicist, recipient of the 1987 National Medal of Science of the U.S.A.,who wrote a book, "Reflections on a Theory of Organisms," in which he used quantum mechanics to understand biology. Quoting from the back cover, "...The author suggests that as one moves from physics to biology, causality becomes more and more replaced by creativity." To me, as a biologist-engineer or bioengineer, creativity is evolution going relataively fast and evolution is creativity going relatively slowly. Evolution and creation are one and the same to me. And nothing can evolve if it does not exist.

I was born in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II. As I began to make sense of the sounds I now recognize as words, many word sounds were about the war, and my life became strongly shaped by a sense that there was something terribly important about war, if only I could find out what it might be, and that finding this out might become among the most important of my concerns. Now, some seventy years later, I find that the purpose of war, as best I can yet grasp it, is to allow humanity to learn and understand how to cease war and warfare.

I find that I am autistic, in the language-delay sense described circa 1944 by Dr. Leo Kanner, in that there seem to be aspects of human language which I will never be able to learn. For me, if for no one else, autism as I experience being autistic. is an aspect of my life which I value and cherish no less than any other aspect. I find being autistic an exceptionally precious and valuable resource for the sort of scientific research I do on the nature of human nature, and especially on the nature of human violence and its plausible future preclusion.

Autism? What sort of autism? I have never experienced a thought in the form of words or pictures. When I read Dr. Temple Grandin's book, "Thinking in Pictures," I wondered what it would be like to be able to do that. Then it struck me. Perhaps many people think in words. It bewilders me to ponder what it would be like were I able to do that.

I am able to imagine, using the techniques of method-acting, what my life might be like were I able to think in words, and I can imagine doing that only briefly because what I am able to imagine invariably, rapidly, becomes utterly terrifying in my imagination. In extensive dialogues with psychologists, psychiatrists, and others, and through "brain scans," I observe that what is, in Freudian terms, called the "preconscious" is the center of my consciousness. I find I am able to think only in patterns of seemingly pure meaning. Yet I am able, sometimes only very poorly, to transliterate meaning into pictures or words, and, the more I practice doing so, the more often what I say seems to make some sense to someone else.

Perhaps I may illustrate what my thoughts and use of words is like. Sometimes I have trouble finding a particular word. I believe some folks refer to this as "having a word on the tip of the tongue." My best guess so far is that, when this happens, a person consciously knows the meaning but not the word for the meaning. It is always like that for me, I never have a clue about what words to use until the meaning I may seek to convey through words is first adequately and vividly consciously clear to me.

Because I am unable to think in words, what I find to be the critical lesson of the infant-child transition, typically starting around the age of 18 months, has been and remains impossible for me to learn. That lesson takes many particular forms, a typical one being, as best I can grasp it, a child doing something the child was told to not do, or not doing something the child was told to do, and the child being told in words, something like, "You were told not to do that and you did it anyway, you were disobedient and you deserve to be punished so you will learn not to be disobedient."

Why am I unable to learn that? Because I find it perfectly unintelligible. Why unintelligible? Because I experience learning in at least three forms, knowing something about, being familiar with, and understanding. In the German language (auf Deutsch), the verb "wissen" refers to "knowing something about," while "kennen" refers to "being familiar with," and "verstehen" refers to "understanding."

A very few words about something and I know something about the something. Having encountered the something gives me familiarity with it. However, I am never able to understand anything I have not already done because I experience understanding as the resulting learning which comes only through having done something. In things such as a parent telling a child, "You knew better because you were told..." I can make no intelligible sense of such a word sequence because I find it, first in meaning and then in my sense of meaning as I can put it back into words, to be, "I demand that you have understood something you did not understand because you did not do it, and I demand this because I told you something you did not and could not understand, and I was told this as a child and came to believe it to avoid being unbearably punished for being truthful, and society demands that truthful children be punished until they become sufficiently untruthful that they can be labeled "normal, and this hurts me more than it hurts you."

What I guess will never make sense to me is this form of equivocation error, the fact that "know" in English seems like one word when it is actually at least three very disparate words. Yet English does have the three words, if "knowing" means "knowing about," if "familarity" means having actually encountered, and if "understanding" means having actually done something and having learned through doing it.

The cause of war? My best hunch for now is that the cause of war is the infant-child discontinuity, which is the conseqence, as best I can yet guess, of a mistake made about the nature of mistakes, said mistake about mistakes having, again as best I can guess, in human pre-history.Only, that does not make real sense to me, either. So, finally, I end up with the cause of war being the present state of evolving creativity. It seems, pardon my British, "bloody clear" that people have yet to learn and understand how to preclude war, and that war presently is of the process of gaining necessary understanding, such that humanity will become able to sufficiently understand what war is and is not, and so be able to choose to not have war.

I find the infant-child transition or infant-child discontinuity to be of a false confession made by the transitioning infant in order to avoid unbearable punishment for being unfailingly truthful. I further find that, prior to sufficient work in scientific psychology and in functional brain imaging and in neuropsychiatry, no one on earth had any way to unriddle what I now call "socialization trauma," its purpose, and its eventual probable value.

In the manner of the work of W. R. D. Fairbairn, I find that what I experience as "ego" was present at, and well before, my physical birth in 1939. And I find that, by being unable to learn ot think in words, I remain in how I experience life, as I was as an infant and before. I can not make judgments, I cannot harbor resentments, I cannot retaliate against people, I do not wish one moment if my life were different than it has been, nor wish it to be different than it is, nor different than it will be. Therefore, I cannot learn to be hateful.

It seems clear to me that every person was once an infant, and that every person was alive before being physically born. Thus, it also seems clear to me that everyone understands, somewhere within, however deeply buried, how I live, because everyone did it before learning how to live otherwise.

Please note that I have written this in accord with the Code of Ethics of the National Society of Professional Engineers, of which I am a member, and therefore please note that I have written this without deception.

Bioengineer 17:04, March 27, 2010 (UTC)

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