“So,” he said, “there I was, sitting in the IMAX theater, waiting for the 3D show to start, and I look over, and sitting in the seat next to me is a praying mantis with 3D glasses on. Yeah! That’s what I thought. The place is infested with bugs. But I didn’t notice others, and this one seemed intent on watching the giant screen with its big bug eyes. One lens was blue, but unlike my 3D glasses, the other was green. No, really, I’m serious. It was a praying mantis with glasses. You would have thought it was there for a 3D showing of A Bug’s Life.”

Newcastle University researchers have actually fitted a mantis with 3D glasses. The lead researcher, Jenny Read, as reported in ScienceDaily online, says that mantises shown 2D films of bugs didn’t attempt to capture a meal, but when they were shown 3D videos, they reached out with those terrible spikey legs. Imagine. That little brain has 3D vision, a fact that was initially discovered by Samuel Rossel decades ago.

Experiments with bugs wearing glasses might seem wholly without merit, possibly the product of a civilization that has reached a point of ultimate ennui, but think again. If we have discovered that a bug has the ability to see the world in ways we might never have imagined, is it not possible that those human critters around us also see the world in depth and in ways that we cannot imagine?    

Although we have called them thus, automobiles have, until recently, never been “auto.” We’ve always had a hand in the process. Self-mobile machines, acting autonomously, are a product of our technology, and they represent a new phase in the way we move from place to place. Of course, self-driving still requires a purpose: Someone has to tell the car not only to go, but also where to go and for how long.

For many there might be a certain charm in having a driverless car chauffer them from point A to point B. Arrive on the red carpet in style with gawkers flashing their phone cameras for pics of the empty driver’s seat while the celebrity emerges in glitter. Travel everywhere while reading a digital book. Send the kids off to practice without concern about an accident. Ah! The future is here. We don’t really have to do much. New found time on our hands. New found sense of importance. “I have a machine that does that for me.”

Not so fast, Miss Daisy. Your newly acquired chauffer has also taken something from you: The details of control. It’s in the handling of those details that you get to express the essence of YOU. A zillion little decisions made the way only YOU could or would make them. Hidden desires revealed in those decisions now manifested in your destinations, maybe hidden abilities, and yes, hidden mistakes from which to learn. Something else: Unexpected destinations with new avenues of opportunity.

Maybe the only truly “automatic” life is the one that relies on the Self for all the decisions. No interference, though constructive criticism is an acceptable intrusion. There will be accidents now and then. There will be wrong turns. Self, however, will be to blame for failure, and Self will claim success.

In a society headed for autonomous technological drivers, are we going down the road that drives Self out of self-control? We’re not just talking cars anymore. We’re talking about a society that takes care of all the little decisions and that promises, however falsely, no accidents and no wrong turns. Comfort and safety: Can you beat that?

A completely safe Self is also one that takes no risks, abandons responsibility, and languishes in the back seat, watching, not driving. Take the wheel, Miss Daisy.

With a little trigonometry anyone can figure out where a projectile is headed, how long it will take to get there, and what trajectory it will take. Consider a projectile to be an object that receives an initial force, but that is not self-powered. Think thrown or hit ball, shot cannonball, or sling-shot pebble, not airplane or rocket.

Now think graph. Vertical component y and horizontal component x. Add gravity (9.8 m/sec/sec). Oh, yes, you’ll need the initial velocity and the angle of inclination from that x axis. That’s about it. That’s all you need. With that info and a little trig, you can figure the height the projectile will reach, the time of its travel, and its travel distance. Math can make some seemingly complex things relatively simple. This might be of no interest to you unless you are a military gunner who wants to know if his howitzer will land a shell on the head of an enemy. Or, it might interest you if you want to figure whether the range of a shortstop allows him or her to reach a ball hit into the shallow outfield. Take the latter as an example. If the shortstop runs at a known rate and the ball is hit a known distance in a known time, can the player reach the ball before it hits the ground? Will the shortstop be too slow to arrive at the ball’s eventual destination? Will he or she make the catch on a ball hit between the infielders and outfielders?

Sometimes you are that shortstop. You have certain gifts and skills that might enable you to intercept something before it reaches its destination. Sometimes you’re just not fast enough to keep the ball from hitting the ground; at other times the ball is hit beyond your reach. That’s the way it is with an addicted person you want to help or with a problem that comes your way. The initial velocity of a person headed toward some personal harmful destiny isn’t easy to know. Addiction is a process, so we don't always recognize the initial velocity. “Oh! Let’s just try this stuff to see what it’s like.” The same goes for problems headed our way. Knowing that initial velocity is often impossible. Once the ball is in flight, however, concerned people need to react like the shortstop. Otherwise, the ball will land in the area beyond the infield but too shallow for the outfielders to catch. For the most part, we see the flight of the ball only after it comes off the bat, and we have to do a bunch of rapid calculating to catch it in time—that is, if we have the skill, time, and the energy to catch it.

Not everyone can be a good shortstop, but even the good shortstops can’t catch every ball before it crashes into the turf. Every shortstop is at a disadvantage. Each tries to position himself or herself to anticipate where a batter might, by habit, hit the ball. Yet, no one can know where the ball will land when it first comes off the bat. It’s only in response to a batted ball that shortstops can act. Sometimes, even when the player tracks the projectile correctly, a problem arises: The projectile hides in the sun or in the multicolored shirts of the crowd. Or the shortstop stumbles.

You can’t catch every ball, and you can’t intercept the fall of every addict or stop every problem from impacting. You can try, however, and you might, if you don’t make the catch, at least recover the ball after the first bounce. Good shortstops keep after the ball, even the balls that they miss. Good shortstops never give up. They sometimes make spectacular plays on balls that others might stop chasing after that initial impact. 

First, there ain’t no such philosophical critter called mono-anthropism. Second, there should be one just for your sake.

If you read cosmologists, you see in their work a struggle with the anthropic principle. According to that principle, the world seems to be “fine-tuned” for human existence because slight changes in any of the fundamental forces in the early universe would have made the universe a very unfriendly place. Stronger gravity would crush everything; weaker gravity would prevent things from coming together. The balance of strengths among gravity, electromagnetism, and the two nuclear forces is just right, isn’t it? You get to be. The universe gets to be. The Big Bang got everything right from subatomic particles to energy. And you, a thinking part of the universe, get to think about your own being in a fortuitous cosmological home.

Fine-tuned for human existence, you say? Surely, there’s a counter argument, and there is. Basically, the struggle with the anthropic principle runs up ladders on the sides of ivory towers. That’s where the siege occurs. That’s where arrows fly from narrow windows cut in thick, almost impenetrable walls. The defenders of those walls have changed over the centuries, but anyone behind the walls is seemingly obligated to defend them. Whereas all the professors in Bologna, where the university started in 1088, would have argued for the anthropic principle without any modern physics to support their views, in today’s more secular universities proponents of any anthropic principle find themselves in the minority, outsiders trying to breach the towers.

In practical terms, arguing for or against an anthropic principle runs from simple faith to complex mathematics on both sides. Maybe the universe is not fine-tuned for human existence. Some would skip the “maybe.” Happy circumstance that the universe is, we just fit in by the chance balance of forces, and it just seems that the universe was made for us. The argument is destined to be unresolvable among opponents. What can we think? Well, we can think that the universe is fine-tuned for thinking without making it personal.

For me, I prefer not an overriding anthropic principle, not the one that includes every conscious being. Rather, I prefer a principle that is mono-anthropic. The universe was fine-tuned just for you. Everything balances on the fulcrum of your life. You are both really and figuratively the universe’s center. Remember that all there is was once in the unimaginably small singularity before the Big Bang. You were in that center; you were part of it. All the subatomic particles in your body, all the forces by which you function, and all the particles and forces by which the entire cosmos functions were in that singularity. And single means “one.” So, yes, I’m for mono-anthropism. The universe, as far as you are concerned, was and is just right for you. You’re the one. And whether or not the fine-tuning took place before the Big Bang, during it, or after, are all irrelevant to the principle of mono-anthropism. A whole universe supports what you are and allows you to be who you are.

Proximity generates concern. To whatever you attend you feel close. Distant accidents, wars, and disease get to your frontal lobe, but not always to your amygdala. Tie events to us in time and space, and we suddenly “feel.” In the current age, electronic media play the chief role in shrinking both time and distance, tying us to people beyond our close circle of acquaintances.

First, Time. A contemporary thirty-year-old wasn’t even alive during the near meltdown of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island’s nuclear reactor. Long ago equates to no memory and no feeling unless some education has occurred.

Second, Space. A senior citizen in Tokyo probably paid only passing attention to the Three Mile Island incident. How did the same person respond when a tsunami breached the sea wall of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant?

 You can shorten distance and compress time when you want, of course. It doesn’t matter whether or not the object of your attention is distant in either time or space. In varying degrees of interest and concern, you now survey even that with which you had no previous connection. In an age of constant media bombardment, there are very few shelters to keep you from the shrapnel of information. Everywhere comes to you. Everywhere can become proximal.

The process of making something proximate can be either beneficial or detrimental.

Your ability to empathize depends upon your corollary ability to make things “close.” But you can also disdain through the same process. Think of your relationship to the rest of the world as a matter of concentricity and diameters.

As a center, you are surrounded by both proximate and distal physical and social phenomena. The inner circles that orbit your personal concerns are important to you; the distant circles less so. The media can make almost everything anywhere close whether or not you want the knowledge or experience.

Because you have the ability to make the distal proximate, you can “feel” for the victims of war, disease, and natural disaster. You can have both positive and negative feelings about any of these victims. If you perceive the “victim” of war is your enemy, then you probably rejoice in his misfortune. The ability to make something proximate has built in limitations, however. An estimated 100 billion humans have gone before you, and the time that separates you from them is a “distance” that protects you from overwhelming empathy or disdain.

For a moment, to understand my point, try to envision modern Erbil and ancient Arbela, the same city separated by time in the autonomous region of Kurdistan. As I write this, forces of ISIS threaten the modern city. Millennia ago the predecessor city Arbela was threatened by various warring factions, including the Assyrians, Medes, and even the Macedonians. Past and present residents suffered the cruelties of violence. Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian king, for example, beheaded people who opposed him. What about your feelings for those who were killed by ruthless leaders and their minions or those who suffered the hardship war and conquest imposed thousands of years ago? Now think of a single person, obviously unknown to you, in present Erbil and one in ancient Arbela. Your contemporary is separated by space; the ancient, by time. Can you empathize? Can you feel the fear in either? To “feel” you need to be somehow “near.”

In the geography of your life you have some choice on what you allow to be proximal and distal. Some are gifted to be close to all and to see each as a person worth empathy. Some are, like the nucleus of an atom, withdrawn far from the peripheral orbiting electrons, a tiny dot 100,000 times smaller than the atom it centers. What is the distance between you and all that encircles you?

Blaise Pascal had a toothache. Bad for him; good for math. Suffice it to say that during his short life (1623-1662) dentistry was not the medical science and practice that it is today. When people in the seventeenth century had toothaches, they didn’t have the recourse that we do. They suffered. And that’s what happened to Blaise. The guy had a really bad toothache and no adequate dentist to help him. What’s a genius to do? Well, Blaise, to stop thinking about the pain in his mouth, started to fool around with math, accomplishing much during 1658 and 1659.

Not that Blaise had been blasé about math: He was a prodigy, discovering, for example, his famous Pascal Triangle at age 13 and Pascal’s Theorem by age 17. But Blaise did become blasé about math when his carriage almost fell from a bridge. The near-death experience forced him to think about life and life after death. Blaise devoted himself to matters of religion after that near accident and largely abandoned mathematical studies, except for the two-year period after the toothache. It was during that time that he produced a work that inspired Leibnitz to invent his calculus.

What might have happened if Blaise had good local dentists? What might not have happened if Blaise had fluoride toothpaste and an electric toothbrush to prevent tooth decay? Would Leibnitz never have constructed his calculus? A two-year period of brilliance and an entire mathematical scheme initiated by a toothache!  

During the last and the current centuries medical scientists have worked to make us pain free. That’s a gain for us, of course. But maybe a little discomfort now and then might unsettle us and inspire us. Maybe the harshness of life is a catalyst in the presence of which brain and inspiration react, and we become creative, if only to distract us from discomfort. What’s that line the fitness gurus often use? No pain, no gain.

Certainly, seeking pain in no way guarantees creativity, and Pascal seems to have demonstrated that after his two-year period of discovery. As a deeply religious person, he returned to contemplating things theological after 1659, and he became more ascetic. He would punish himself for impiety by wearing a belt with nails that he would push into his skin with his elbows. During that period of self-imposed pain he abandoned math as he had after the near accident.

You don’t have to seek discomfort to be creative, but you also don’t have to think that a period of discomfort is a time for self-absorption and pity. You might enter into your most creative period when harsh circumstances arise. Remember that this is not your practice life. All of it. Even the tough times and painful circumstances. Your period of brilliance is as close as your next toothache, paper cut, or debilitating disease, but your period of brilliance can also last a lifetime. Don’t become blasé like Blaise.

When you were in algebra class, you learned a number of formulas. Why? There you were, a middle school student, looking at letters bound to other letters by the symbols of arithmetic. So what? What does an X have to do with anything that would be of interest to a preteen or young teenager? Ah! The adults had a conspiracy. They wanted to infuse your brain with a way of thinking that would spill over into almost every opinion you would have later in life. “What good is algebra? When will I ever have to use it?” you asked. 

And now, here you are, years later using the methods of algebraic proofs in your daily life. How so? To answer, let’s look at what algebra might use. If I say

ax^2 + bx + 3 = 0

what am I saying? You might remember that as the standard form of a quadratic equation. Why the letters in front of the Xs? Well, you could put numbers there. The letters “a” and “b” stand in for coefficients of the Xs. But how would you know that to resolve the equation you could use something as simple as

                        -b+ /- √(b)2 -4(a)(c)

                        ---------------------------     ?

                                    2(a)

This is where you come in personally. The reason for the “a,” the “b,” and the “c” (which is 3 in the equation), is that the problem can always be solved. We know that whatever numbers we put in place of the “a” and the “b,” we can always find the solution and get to the root of the problem. Somebody figured out that it would be impossible to demonstrate the validity of the solution if we just used numbers instead of letters. We would have an infinite number of numbers to test, and we would never know whether or not this algebraic process would be correct the next time we used it. With the letters we overcome the problems that individual numbers would pose. You have used this system of proof most, if not all, of your life to validate your opinions.

Nerds. Stupid people. Beautiful people. Used car salesmen. Rocket scientists. Street people. Druggies. Politicians. Any group becomes the coefficient of X. The system makes it easy for you to prove your point, whatever that point is. “Oh! Look. It’s a famous singer! Quick! Get the camera. I want a Selfie.” Why?

The “a” and “b” make confirmation bias easy. The proof always works for you regardless of the value of either “a” or “b.” You have predetermined that your solution to the problem of humanity will always work. Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, European Americans, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Hindus, Atheists, Agnostics, Animists, and the neighbors down the street: Plug any of them into the process and you always come up with an easy solution in its infinite variety. Nerds are not good sports pundits. Nuns know nothing about sex. Beautiful people rarely have blemishes or physical ailments. This group is bad. That group is good. Plug the individuals into any of your equations, and you get the answers you want. You can get the root of the problem. Why are others having so much difficulty learning YOUR algebraic system?

You get the roots of the problem because you have a handy method that always works for you. Regardless of the specific nature of the individual, you’re always right. Maybe you did learn something from algebraic proofs and processes. Just remember that people are neither coefficients nor Xs.

We’ve heard the expression, or we’ve learned the principle by experience: Laughter is contagious. So is yawning, and, some might argue, is creativity.

In the 1930s Mikhail Chailakhyan proposed that a substance he named florigen stimulated a host plant to flower in response to a grafted stem that was about to flower. No one has been able to identify florigen (from flora, “flower” and genno, to “beget”) to this day, but the principle seems to extend throughout the flowering plants. Again, a stem that is about to flower seems to stimulate the host plant into flowering. Chailakhyan even tried this in successful cross-species experiments with similar results.

I almost want to shout out Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse…” when I think about Chailakhyan’s florigen. Here we are, supposedly highly sophisticated, rational, and learned people, and we can’t identify the cause of a similar effect in humans, one that we can definitely use to enhance our condition.

Laughter is contagious. Creativity, too. Put a smiling person in a room full of frowners, and watch expressions change. Put a laughing person in a room of gloom, and watch a dawning brightness. And put a creative person in a room, and watch the cognitive wheels turn.

You can be that human florigen. You can cause flowering in a seemingly dormant society. You don’t have to understand the process. You don’t have to identify the substance. Your flowering causes others to flower. It’s a mystery, but through experience in many cross-mood personal experiments, we all know about florigen.

Snow turning to ice, accumulating sometimes for decades, sometimes for centuries, sometimes for millennia: Glaciers take on two basic forms, those that are widespread continental sheets up to three miles thick and those that are river-like because they occupy U-shaped mountain valleys mostly of their own making. Both move as they are pulled by gravity and pushed by the growing mass at the point of origin. In accumulating and in moving, glaciers do work by plowing, gouging, and depressing the land under their great weight. When they melt, they leave behind rock debris, gouges, and lakes on an altered landscape. 

If we could take away Greenland’s glaciers, we could see the depth of depression, land so burdened by ice it lies below sea level. Above the depressed surface a cover of ice rises thousands of feet. If we could take away the rivers of ice that occupy mountain valleys, we could see steps carved into the mountains. Over the last two million years glaciers have radically changed the high-to-middle latitude continents. They have even shaped the top of Kilimanjaro’s peak as it stands over the sweltering plains below, and their melt waters have reshaped islands in the tropics.

A casual visit to a glacier reveals little to the untrained eye. Is it a motionless mass of cold? How can it be doing any work? Glaciologists and geomorphologists can assure you that indeed it is doing work. Stick around. You’ll see changes in both ice and landscape. Visit America’s upper Midwest. See the hummocky ground, the lakes, the peat bogs? All there because of ancient glaciers. Visit the Great Lakes. They are there because of ancient glaciers. Look at the sculpted mass of rock in Yosemite. Again, glaciers were the scuptors. And when the ice accumulated on the continents, the oceans fell, having given their water to the glaciers. Indonesia, far from the glaciers, was largely connected; there was a Bering Land Bridge, also, that served as an avenue for migration for the earliest Americans. When the glaciers melted, the seas rose, and the isolated animal species and human ancestors give testimony to the far-reaching effects of ice. Where once they walked, the ocean now covers and serves as a barrier. We live and walk on landscapes shaped by glaciers, even in the tropics.

As glaciers reshape the land so cold indifference works on the human landscape in unseen ways, slowly changing it, but changing it nevertheless. Abandoned children, abandoned spouses and lovers, abandoned elderly, abandoned homeless, abandoned addicts, abandoned slaves, abandoned ethnic groups: All are changed by the accumulating cold. All are depressed under the weight of apathy. Look out over the human landscape. No generation in 10,000 has escaped the effects of such ice. Each glacial advance alters the next generation, leaves debris on the human landscape, or, in melting, isolates with inundating water, making islands where once there were human connections. Such ice has probably influenced human evolution as much as “ice ages.”

When we ignore those in need, are we glacial? Among families, between spouses, and in society, ice does its work to separate us, leaves debris in our lives, and reshapes relationships. In some way, all of us have been shaped by accumulations of ice in past generations. Are we the glaciers shaping the future of humanity? Is every age an Ice Age?   

Please don’t tell me you went through stages. Please tell me you can’t look on your life and say, “Well, at the time I was going through my such-n-such phase.” Please tell me you haven’t categorized your life or identified a hierarchy within your past.

Please say, “I was the epitome of diversity.”

Arnold Lucius Gesell described developmental theories that characterize growth through stages by reducing them to four properties: 1) Predicting qualitative differences in behavior that result from experience, 2) Assuming invariance in the stages, 3) Assuming structural nature in a stage, and 4) Translating structures from one stage to another. Now, let’s look at you.

Is there any set of stages that consistently frame your life? Are you a product of pattern?

Patterns are undeniably infusive in human development, aren’t they? Patterns allow us to recognize individuals. Think of the last time you did something that did not involve a pattern. Dream, maybe. That’s probably why you awoke to say, “That made no sense.” So, when you look back on your life, you might favor imposing patterns. Interestingly, you didn’t see those patterns when you were supposedly in them, making them, following them. It’s only in retrospect that you or someone else can impose an order, and then, through analog, say that someone else is going through a stage. Not every two-year-old goes through the “terrible twos,” as you know. Not every teenager is rebellious.

Look at Gesell’s first property, predicting qualitative differences that result from experience. Some of us never grow up, right? Some of us pursue folly to an untimely end. Is such a life a single stage? Or do we need an indefinite number of stages in human life to characterize all the diversity of our species? Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s why we have so many psychological theories with so many identified stages.

Why, we even have an unpredictability stage that we can predict.

Some psychologists might be very upset with me now (They’re going through a predictable stage in this, so give them some room to vent). Their objection is as valid as it is invalid. In that there are seven billion people at the moment and in that there have been about 100 billion humans, logic suggests that some categorizing of human behavior and thought is inevitable. Plus, all those studies of development suggest stages. Why am I challenging the notion of stages?

I don’t want you to settle. I don’t want you locked in a pattern. I don’t want you isolated in place. When you review your life without the notion of stages, you find great diversity, less structure than others would impose, and more freedom than you initially remember. Even those who “plan” their lives seem to “wake” years later to say, “That made no sense.”

Reason has its uses. Categorization has its. Logic seems unshakeable. Maybe others can look at you generally and impose a pattern of stages and pinpoint some behavior or another that at some time places you in one of their predictable stages. But you, the real you, are what you are because, from the perspective of others imposing stages, you lived and are still living in a chaotic dream. It’s your life and no other’s.