Notebook and Journal

The Stuff of Life: When Things That Need to Work Don’t

Fri, 8 Jul 2011 23:05:10 -0700

The Spark of Life

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

(The following is a review of the book Spark, by John Ratey.)

It is often said that all writing is, in some way, autobiographical. Though this observation most commonly covers fictional works, it seems to apply to many forms of non-fiction as well.

John Ratey is a practicing psychiatrist, a Harvard professor in the same field, a master explicator, and an exercise enthusiast and evangelist with, as he describes it, a fairly scattered personal history. Taken altogether, then, an ADHD/MD, fitness-buff, sort of fellow.

Thus, it is engagingly appropriate that Spark is very much a hybrid sort of book: part meta-study, part self-help, and part polemic. (The latter sub-genre is. interestingly, synchronistic: As I was reading Spark, the news contained stories of many on the political right taking issue with First Lady Michelle Obama for her campaign to improve the nation’s eating and exercise habits. Just think, one said, how many more pedestrian casualties we would have more people walked all the time.) This neither fish-nor-fowl style of writing is hard to pull off, but Ratey and co-author Eric Hagerman make it work.This is surely due, in large part, to Dr. Ratey’s obvious passion for all three framings (“I want nothing less than to get you hooked”), along with Hagerman’s stylistic acumen. (I do have a couple of editorial cavils, however. Well-chosen metaphors can be charming, and even enlightening. But one must be careful. Calling osteoporosis a “heartbreaking illness” is excruciatingly ill-advised, and saying that dementia “is not unlike when a fuse gets blown in a home’s circuit breaker” is simply oxymoronic. Oh, well; it’s hard for even the best editors to catch everything.)

Spark’s central thesis is that humans have evolved, as “endurance predators”, to keep active, so it should be no surprise that movement, of the type needed for ancestral survival, is required for the proper functioning of our bodies, but, emphatically, our brains as well. Indeed, as far as complex chemistry, structure, and function are concerned, bodies and brains are two aspects of the same package. Why else, Ratey asks, would we need brains in the first place, except to move? Plants don’t need brains; that is because they are quite content being in one spot.

Through chapters dealing with Learning, Stress, Anxiety, Depression, Attentional Deficit, Addiction, Hormonal (particularly OB/GYN) Changes, and—my favorite—Aging, the formula remains the same: Describe the concept or “disorder” from a clinical point of view; discuss current theories of its etiology or development; survey established treatment (mostly pharmaceutic) protocols; and then offer exercise (usually some form of aerobic regimen, along with a nod to various relaxation and complex movement techniques) as a low-risk,high-value alternative, or, at least, adjunct.

(To his credit, Ratey has no wish to give up on either drugs or talk therapy. Both have their places. But, according to Spark, we shouldn’t rely on them exclusively when exercise is such a readily available (and even fun) holistic solution. In this regard, Jungian synchronicity rears its head once again, though I think Jung would not, in this case, have been amused. As I was writing this review, an article appeared in the New York Times about how many psychiatrists are giving up on talk therapy, mainly because they can get more bang for the buck, not to mention more bucks overall, by emulating other medical service providers. That is, in essence: see patients briefly and prescribe a lot of pills. The changes seem to make most people satisfied, including patients and, of course, insurance companies. Howbeit, this “fast medicine” approach does make me think of parallels with the fast food industry, which certainly “satisfies” customers with a lot of calories per dollar spent. Yet, somehow, the comprehensive health of the general population appears not to be improving.)

For each chapter’s discussion, Ratey backs up his claim, both theoretically and empirically, referring to (if, sadly, not actually referencing) the latest research in neurophysiology and related fields. Along the way, we are regaled with glimpses into the investigational lives of lab superstars such as Elizabeth Gould, Carl Cotman, Eric Kandel, and many others, not to mention the important work of countless anonymous, long-suffering rodentine contributors. (Rats have come a long way, we might observe, since the days for B. F. Skinner and his students.) This, however, does point up a major issue in popularizing science: Mass media accounts thrive on anecdotes and personal testimony, which scientists, in writing for other scientists, anathematize, except, perhaps, at the brainstorming, pre-hypothesis phase of dialogue.

Nevertheless, for their educational and proselytizing purposes, Ratey and Hagerman have done a remarkable job. At least, they have inspired me to redouble my own efforts to delay or ameliorate the ravages of aging. And, just perhaps, Spark may also ignite new and exciting lines of research.
_____________________________________________________________

(And Below are some additional musings about specific chapters of Spark that were not in the review.)

Attention deficit I have a large problem with the term “disorder” Though it may have a precise technical meaning within psychiatry, “disorder” connotes, to most of us, a severely negative condition (in the same way as “abnormal”). Yet, I cannot view either the “AD” or the “H” that way. Regardless of its undeniable genetic (and neuronic and structural) correlates, it seems to me that a good deal of ADHD must be part of the normal distribution of personality types within the general population—just somewhat unusual “alleles”, as it were. In this, it might be similar to handed-ness, shyness, and homosexuality, all of which have complex geneses—and all of which have been commonly treated as “disorders”. Another way to say this is that the population as a whole is almost certainly better off for the diversity.

True, to buy into my conceptualization requires accepting a form of the dreaded, even taboo idea of group selection. Nevertheless, it does provide a parsimonious way of thinking about religion, patriotism, signing onto the program of one’s mentor, and other activities of the tribal community. Individual selection may work at the level of the organism, but humans are hardly human without social interactions, which have their own dynamics (which, come to think about it, is very like the case with genes themselves). That is to say, a diverse set of traits within a population can be viewed as “adaptive” for the group at least, whether or not any particular “skill” imparts greater fitness on a specific individual.

In this regard, I think that adolescent ADHD is almost certainly over-diagnosed (though it may be under-noted for adults). After all, the clinical purpose of diagnosis is to establish a treatment protocol—which, these days, is most commonly of the pharmaceutical type, and which provides a substantial income to the purveyors of of the designated therapy. In practice, however, the ministrations may be merely suppressing an unconventional, though important (and maybe even necessary) expression of a normal personality—that is, lopping off the tails of a normal distribution within a population. How does this help? If my reading is correct, shouldn’t the emphasis be on exploiting talents (and, of course, helping the people involved come to terms with their minority standings) rather than on squashing heterodoxy (for fun and profit)?

In a crucial sense, it is truly a matter of adaptations, and adaptations are always about context: As an extreme example, consider the Rambos of the universe. Yes, during normal times, psychopathology is what the term suggests: a sickness that is destructive and anti-adaptational. However, what about when the arthropod clones from Rigel 7 attack? We Terrans would rue the day last of the unstable berserkers were eliminated from the “gene” pool. (The trick, of course, is to keep them on-call, but generally in the barracks.)

But evolution often works that way: Extreme environmental conditions demand genetic, or neurological, or social, or psychological, or very lucky outliers (or some combination of the above). I don’t blame nature for hedging her bets, and that is what, I think, ADHD is all about. (Exercise is, of course, one mechanism nature uses to keep nifty but squirrelly machinery well-oiled, even though its full functionality is not required—for now.)

Aging The way we grow old has long been a fascination to me (too long, my my detractors might snort: “Move aside, Pops, we’re comin’ through.”) A couple of Spark’s rhetorical points dovetail rather neatly with my own thoughts regarding superannuation and caducity. First: If we don’t use it, we lose it; If we don’t move, we don’t really need a brain. Sure, nature is very economical, which allows us to easily conform to the environment we inherit (or create); what we don’t need now tends to atrophy, or get placed in dead storage. Still, without denying that brains and bodies are a team sport—soul-mates, if you will—it is fair, I think, to say that there are many different kinds of survival skills; when one weakens, others can often compensate.

I appreciated the story Dr Ratey tells of his mother, who stayed healthy and active, until she didn’t (more of this story later). My own mother died at nearly 92 with, so far as I could tell, zero cognitive loss, though she had macular degeneration, arthritis, and, toward the end, consequential dizzy spells, exacerbated by the lack of muscular strength to break her falls. But then, she was a school teacher who solved at least one crossword puzzle every day I knew her, read the Aeneid to my sister and me (in Latin), and, after my father died, took up bridge, photography, world travel, and studied Spanish and geology fervently.

A second case-in-point: A client of mine is nearly 96, still composing and playing the piano extremely well. This month, Randy has scheduled a lecture/demonstration covering all of Book II of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (he did Book I last year). He speaks fluent French and German, and reads, for a start, Rilke, Molière, Shakespeare, and the New York Times every day. He seems to have a cogent comment about nearly everything. Though his hearing is poor, he understands (largely from context, I’m guessing) nearly all that I say. Yet he never converses very long (unless he is in his professorial mode), as he seems to be always on his way to a social event or cooking dinner for “a few guests”. Yet, Randy rarely exercises. He doesn’t even practice very much, though he does tip a Scotch glass every night.

Third Case: My old orchestra director is also nearly 96. Though his knees and other body parts are clearly wearing out, forcing inactivity on him, Bill’s memory (both recent and long-term) is sharper that of most grad students. He remains a master story-teller, and, since, amazingly, his eyes are still sharp, his skills with photography remain excellent. Probably worth noting: During his time at the University, Bill spent almost every lunch hour swimming laps. Also worth noting, perhaps, is the large family: nine natural children and one adopted, plus a passel of later descendants. (One child remains a nun; more of that story later.)

Finally, my father-in-law. John had an eighth-grade education, dropping out to work on the family farm, then at the lumber mill where he had a life-threatening accident, and lastly at the Public Utility District, first as a lineman and finishing as Supervisor. Even in retirement, he was constantly puttering at something, like installing an extra sump pump or learning a new tune on the piano (he never could read music), and he remained physically active all the years he and Hazel remained at the house (he cleaned his own steeply pitched roof until he was 85 or so). Like the others cited above, John was the primary caregiver for a failing spouse (my own father died when I was 10). The difference, I am sure, was his age when his mission (I think this is a reasonable word) was accomplished—indeed, Hazel outlived John by a couple of difficult years. John’s last major accomplishment was to move the two of them into an assisted living facility. You know the type of place: one floor; wheelchairs everywhere; always-open doors and televisions blasting constantly (during her last months, Hazel watched the same Cary Grant movie hundreds of times, I’m sure, with, at every viewing, the same surprised joy at the climax); and a limited, too-busy staff that doesn’t even try to answer all the pages. After the move, John went downhill very fast. He was in the dementia housing within a few months and died a short while after that. (What kind of dementia? My daughter was with him a few hours before he died. She reports that she talked to Granddad at some length without eliciting a response. Finally, she told him that she loved him, but had to leave. Then his last words, so far as we know: “Okay, Amy, now run like hell.”)

I am leery of drawing conclusions from anecdotes and other personal narratives, though they resonate heavily for most people. (Why should this be? I suspect that such accounts represent aboriginaL “folk statistics” that, like “folk physics”, “folk arithmetic”, “folk music”, and the like, come as SICSs—Standard Issue Cognitive Sets. Any higher-order understanding is not “natural”, or hard-wired, meaning that it requires specialized training. Nevertheless, much advanced cognition itself relies on narrative, so stories will always have a place, even in science. Stories can be long-form metaphors, which allow us to leap many levels of abstraction in a single bound.)

The lesson I inferred from the story of Dr. Ratey’s mother has to do with more than walking briskly, critical though that may be. The larger picture, I think, concerns one’s home in the universe (apologies to Stuart Kauffman). But this doesn’t really get at what I’m thinking. The term “universe” is fine; “home” is the problem, as it suggests “territory” and “sanctuary”. Both are part of the picture, but for exploratory creatures like humans, I think “home” must be more like what the mathematicians call “possibility space”. In other words, the universe itself. Though this space is, for all practical purposes, infinite, many trajectories through it are essentially impassible. Size matters here, but less so than routing; New obstacles and impediments are not a happy business. Ratey’s mother’s hip problems condensed the size of her universe, both directly and indirectly, since her walking habits served, physiologically, as a signal to the body and mind regarding the extent of her world. One hip down, there may still be alternate paths to the future, the temporal part of one’s universe; Two down, the whole shebang implodes.

I began thinking about the universe business in light of medical treatment philosophies about a year ago, when I served time in the hospital to deal with the ravages of a nasty little auto-immune disease (officially diagnosed as Wegener’s granulomatosis). For the first day and a half, my universe was scrunched into the size of a bed. Gradually, my boundaries were extended; by the end of my term, I was entertaining visitors in the courtyard. And I learned a few things: 1) It is nearly impossible to take the stairs anywhere in a hospital; 2) the staff gets really nervous seeing members of my caste wandering about the public areas in full patient raiment; 3) it irritates ward personnel if you want to walk a lot of laps. Regarding the last point, I was regularly accosted on my rounds (100 laps or more a day): “Why don’t you just stay in your bed, and relax with the TV?” I’d always say something flip, on the grounds that getting such folks off script was desperately important. Something like, “relaxing makes me nervous.” That is true, actually. But my real concern was the intent to even further restrict my place in the scheme of things for their convenience. The nephrology ward is on the 11th floor. During morning laps I would stop by the visitor’s lounge to watch the sunrise of the Cascades and dream of a larger universe that needed exploring.

Once you have done real exploration, of course, television doesn’t work so well anyway. An Island neighbor was an Apollo astronaut. Bill never walked on the moon, but he made it there. He is now in his late 70s and officially retired, though he still collects (and flies) vintage aircraft—everything from biplanes to cold-war era MIGs. I didn’t know Bill when he was young, but I gather he was a bit like my late brother-in-law, Steve: a classic ADHD kid (though there was no such formal designation then) who found his bearings first in sports and, later, as a military officer. (Steve had two tours of duty in Viet Nam, once as a Marine pilot and the other as a ground commander. He was later killed driving his plane into Chesapeake Bay.)

(My notebook includes the outline of a couple of long essays about what I learned about hospitals, treatment, and the specialist system within the medical-industrial complex. [This boils down to: Hospitals are no places for sick people; and medical practitioners are squeamish about holistic approaches. Their unease in this regard seems to relate both to scientific respectability and parochial commercial interests. Yet bodies are by their nature, communal, holistic enterprises that are not fully compatible with reductionist analyses.] Here, I will just mention one observation as it relates to Spark. Jeff, a nurse, is a rock climber, biker, and cross-country skier. He was easily the most physically aware and knowledgable staff member I met during my “stay”. Yet my questions about workout regimens in a complicated disease context [the questions had to do with oxidative stress] left him, past the obligatory “take plenty of fresh-air walks”, scratching his head. He had never been asked those question, and had never been trained in how to answer them.)

This brings us around to the nuns. I had heard elsewhere the story of Sister Bernadette and her colleagues, but Spark sets it in an interesting context, which fits right into my framework of Universe and alternate pathways to the future, which, in fact, seem to be built into neuronal architecture.

Sister Claire is a Carmelite, the daughter of the aforementioned orchestra director, and a friend. Her community has been a client of mine for several projects, and I love them all dearly. Many Carmelites live up to the cloistered stereotype, but those of Reno have taken a much different route, reconsidering the meaning of “community”. Their small band of about 15 members eschews the habit and uses given names. I stay in the guest suite, but have the run of the place (“pay no attention to the [Cloister—Private] sign”, and “feel free to raid the refrigerator any time, day or night”), and I generally take meals with them, except for breakfast, which, for the Sisters, comes very early. Meals are lively affairs, with conversation coming from all sides, covering current events, history, politics, religion (including its dirty linen, as it were), and even sex. Some of the women are more physically active than others (Claire herself swims at the hospital pool), but all stay busy. And, so far as I can tell, even the oldest members (a couple are in their 90s and have various bodily troubles) have no cognitive decline. Most of the nuns still drive, and all carry cell phones. There are multiple MIDI workstations (composing and arranging music are part of the “family business”) Even the hermitage huts have ethernet and internet access.

But to my way of thinking, their most profound innovation is re-imagining community in a dynamic way: Everything from transient withdrawal (a week or two in hermitage) to full engagement with the external world counts. This means that the community is literally vibrant—it “pulsates”, varying from small to large and back again, seamlessly, from all I can tell.Their “home” is more about an arc through eternity than a static territory

How cool is that? But enough. Writing is fun; being productive is terrific, but I agree: Let’s balance and support our efforts with a trip to the gym, or the moral equivalent thereof. For me, a mortal being, it’s not exactly a matter of health, which is always conditional and transitory. Rather, it is about being content (even in discontent). It is about exulting in one’s place in the universe.

To Serve and Oppose

Fri, 6 Feb 2009 22:00:06 -0800

Realclearpolitics.com blogger Jay Cost’s recent essays (http://www.realclearpolitics.com/horseraceblog/2009/02/republicans_and_obamas_informa.html; http://www.realclearpolitics.com/horseraceblog/2009/02/the_limits_of_bipartisanship.html) on the nature of partisanship in the American political process provide something of a palliative for those who bemoan the uncooperativeness of the Republicans, vis-a-vis the Democrats, in the latest debates over President Obama’s requested economic recovery package. I do not propose to provide a complete exegesis of Mr. Cost’s point of view. Nevertheless, I wish to take issue with one thing—perhaps the critical thing.

Mr. Cost’s closing paragraph sums it up correctly:

Ultimately, I think his power in the early part of the presidency is going to be conditioned by the final result on the stimulus bill: can he guide a measure through Congress that gains bipartisanship support? Can he convince both sides to put partisanship aside, come together, and take ownership of a national recovery strategy? That’s what he campaigned on, and I think that is what the public expects.

An earlier statement, however, is more provocative, in a troubling sort of way. In asking why the Congressional Republicans should be, in the words of Sen. David Vitter, “scared to death” (of President Obama’s high approval ratings), Mr. Cost muses, “They’re the opposition...shouldn't they oppose?” Well, no. It’s one thing when politics is a a team sport. But when we are all in the same boat in stormy seas, it’s no longer a game. I suggest that, especially nowadays, the responsibility of the (minority) “opposition” party is precisely that of the majority: to serve “that government of the people, by the people, for the people…..” “The people” is often taken to refer to an office holder’s local constituency (in practice, to his or her major donors). I would argue that the phrase properly means just what it says, so…all the people. Ultimately, of course, the relevant constituency for both parties is not even the president, or a merely national, or even international audience, but to the future…of life on earth.

To be sure, individuals can have legitimately different ideas of how “the people” can be best served. In the present case, though, the people have spoken: The standard-issue Republican stalking horses, “tax cuts”, “small government”, and a supply-side free market policy, will not trot. They have raced and pulled up lame. Likewise, the economic assumption that individuals are “rational” decision makers is no longer held in high regard, even among those individuals in question. Thus, in the quest for good ideas, regardless of party affiliation, the above concepts do not qualify. Neither is it a legitimate “opposition” tactic to take potshots at micro-constituencies. Yes, for example, the House recovery plan includes minor support for the arts. And this is “pork”…how? A pittance to give jobs to starving creators of beauty and curators of culture? This is worse than turning over billions of dollars to those few who threw a spanner into the spokes of the world’s financial machine and incinerated the wealth of the rest of us…how?

The nation in particular, and life in general, do not work by competition alone. Rather, they progress by balancing the side dish of cooperation with the main course of cooperation.

Nothing Stimulates the Mind Like the Prospect of an Imminent Demise

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:45:14 -0800

Of Our Place in it All

Mon, 5 May 2008 23:38:06 -0700

I have decided to post a very personal piece (originally from the year 2000), that I have not, until now, made public; only a few, other than my daughter, have read it. I have recently been encouraged, however, to make it more available. After much consideration.…here it is.

Dear Daughter,

Your mother reports that you and Boy Friend are not quite on the same page regarding religion, and how to think about it in a scientific milieu. Without knowing the particulars, I’m nevertheless guessing that you are not as far apart as all that. Perhaps it’s more like you’re reading from different editions, or, maybe—and this is both depressingly and gloriously common—you are both victims of incompatible definitions of terms. In any case, you and I haven’t had a good religious discussion in some time. I would like to atone for this and share some of my thoughts. I hope that these may be useful in marshaling your own on the issue.

At the outset, I wish to make a disclaimer: What I am going to say to you is certainly not everything that can be said, and I have simplified my own views somewhat (I hope not “dumbed them down”). This is because 1) The language police notwithstanding, “religion” is really a catch-all metaphor meaning many different, but not necessarily mutually exclusive, things, including several I will talk about little or not at all (“belief” itself seems to mean little in this context, except for purposes of rallying the troops; behavior seems to be much more germane), or I will conjoin several aspects. In other words, call we what “religion” is really a “pandemonious community of ideas”, if you will, existing in different proportions in all of us. (By the way, my use of “scare quotes”, here and elsewhere, indicate words or phrases of slippery definitions, AKA “metaphors”.) 2) This is a letter to my kid, not a major treatise or thesis topic. In any worthy discussion, there are always many possible levels of explanation. For example, invoking “God” or “Faith” or what have you does not mean the invoker is necessarily religious (or ir-), depending on which level we wish to view the matter from, and we just won’t be able to check out all the levels. And 3) I myself am different from day to day. Like everyone else, I learn, forget, and have (literally) a different perspective from moment to moment (Heroclitus is reputed to have said, approximately, that a person cannot step into the same river twice), so I would undoubtedly choose to write things differently tomorrow or next month. These matters are, by the way, why I refuse to answer any yes or no question about my own beliefs, of lack thereof. Such questioning invariably is coming from only one level of explanation (that is, it comes with its own agenda). Seemingly, it is also invariable that my interrogator-cum-tormentor’s level is not the same one I wish to respond from. (Now, If this comment lets my ideological cat out of the bag, well, I guess there’s no help for it. Anyone thus vexed will not be getting the message anyway. But this would not be my progeny!)

Having said that….

According to astronomer and physicist Chet Raymo, religion as humans practice it comprises three general elements: a shared cosmology (that is, how the world got to where it is now and our place in it), spirituality (how we respond on a personal level to perceived numinous aspects of creation), and liturgy (public expressions of gratitude and celebration). Suggesting the modularity of religion is a good start. I would say, though, that each concept represents a continuum, and I would add a fourth: an agreed way to learn and know the “truth”. The reason I make this addition will become clear as we go along. (Please note that many people use the word “spiritual” to suggest something supernatural. For that, I prefer the term, “transcendent”, discussed later. I use “spiritual” as a synonym for numinous, meaning a sense of the sublime.)

My first thought is that, when people argue religion, they are usually arguing only the first part. It makes no sense to disagree about spirituality: All people, not just those who call themselves religious, have feelings of the sublime, things that are beyond themselves, whether or not those things can be described physically. Those who know music theory deeply can still be moved mightily by a good performance of Mahler 5, say (might I say, even more moved?). And, when a scientist looks upon a summer night’s sky blazing with untold points of light, what is her response? In a famous footnote, the great theoretical physicist Richard Feynman wrote,

“I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on the carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light…What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it.”

And that from a man who claimed to be an atheist!

I am convinced that even very cold personalities feel a shiver of the numinous, the spiritual gestalt that is far more than the individual pieces of nature that can be described in an equation or two. Humans—all humans, regardless of creeds or professional animas—are built to be sensitive to spiritual things; that individual responses vary is merely a celebration of diversity. (Diversity? How can detestable, patently wrong people add anything good to life? This is a complex issue; here, I would only throw in, by way of analogy, the observation that dung beetles, too, have some pretty disgusting habits, but they turn out to be rather useful in the entire scheme of things.)

Likewise, it is asinine to fight about liturgical matters, which are, at the heart of it, aesthetic concerns. Would armies go to war over cherry vs. grape Popsicles? Or Beethoven vs. Brahms? Regrettably, some would, it is true. Peoples and nations have been wiped out for less. But it is not the mark of a mature people to consider such trivialities important. (Do you remember, when you were very young, watching Max Fleischer’s animated version of Gulliver’s travels, where the competing parties were ready to eradicate each other over which song would be sung at a wedding? What a moral!)

No, when people argue religion, they are more likely shouting, “My cosmology (and, maybe, its Creator) is bigger’n your cosmology—nyah, nyah, nyah!” Or at least more RIGHT. Of the scientists who pooh-pooh traditional religions, and there are many, a common argument is that the canonic ways of describing how we got to where we are now (in the Western world, this usually refers to what the Bible seems to say on the subject) are silly to a modern world imbued with rational explanations for things, or at least rational ways to find those explanations. Of the Bible thumpers who bad-mouth science, and there are many, the counter-argument is often simply that rational thought is, in fact, irrational, because it (apparently) contradicts the inerrant Word of God—that is, this is a matter of faith, not science. Still others object to both views, on the grounds that neither rational thought nor blind faith is sufficiently “human” (or, in the mind of some “poets”, sufficiently “beautiful”).

My own cosmology, the “creation myth” I see as most appropriate, comes down fully on the side of the scientific explanations. When we, as a culture, were young, supernatural explanations may have made a certain amount of sense. But the more we learn—and, here, I’m talking more about maturing as a civilization than the increase in our body of learning, although there is that, too—the less this is so. In my opinion, it is a terribly lousy deity that bends nature to match his (quite human) worshippers’ theology about him. Lousy and unlikely: The universe, we might say, is under no obligation to cater to, or even be aware of, human wishes and sensitivities!

It may be, as biologist Edward O. Wilson suggests, that humans have evolved to believe in gods. And philosopher William James (who is also the “father” of psychology as a modern empirical science) mused long and hard about the same subject, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, coming up with much the same conclusion (100 years ago! What a mind, what a writer!). I suspect this is largely true: The world at least seems work best if a majority (but not all) of its inhabitants are somewhat religious (especially along the numinous-ness continuum), so long as the “somewhat” is not openly warring with other evidence of how the universe works. (Of course, it is also true that the world works considerably less well if the majority is too religious—as in fundamentalist.) So, at least in a social sense, belief seems to be “adaptive” —in the terms of evolution, “selected for”. Indeed, sociologist Rodney Stark makes the excellent argument that early Christianity likely got a major boost (leading, from simple beginnings, to dominance in only three centuries) simply by keeping more of its members alive during epidemics than did the rival (pagan) religions, mostly because of a “superior” (and enforceable) ethical system. (There is, by the way, an ongoing academic debate over what it means to talk about the social, or group aspects of evolution, but the technical arguments need not concern us here. The fact remains that humans are social animals, and however we got the bodies and minds we have, our lives are played out in a social context.)

So, can we assume that human evolution hit upon religion as a good solution to a problem? Not everyone thinks so. Some scientists think of it more like a “virus” (the pejorative is usually intentional, though it seems fair to point out that some literal viruses are benign, or even helpful to organisms) that exists only to reproduce, not because it is really a good idea. (In that sense, all “life” exists to reproduce, which is the whole point of life, isn’t it…?) Others, like neurophysiologist William Calvin, suggest that religion is a remnant from an earlier age, a prototype science that hasn’t yet died off after a better alternative came onto the scene. These pundits are largely thinking of the fourth element of religion, the how and what of knowledge, and its interaction with cosmology. They are also thinking of hierarchical institutions: God tells the laws to the pope (or the shaman), who tells the bishops, who tell the priests….This is the “faith”, or “revelation” way of coming into (religious) belief, but it isn’t the only possible course to a working creed. The church I grew up in, for example, was not only quite tolerant in what to believe, but also insisted that raw faith, without empirical knowledge, was not sufficient for belief. And hierarchy, in that small congregation, did not come much into play. My father—you would have liked him—was not what you would call an especially religious man, and most Sunday mornings would find him in his shop, carpentering something or other. But he did enjoy (sometimes) going to church, for the peculiar pleasure of getting disgusted with the sermons. The funny thing is, the preacher seemed to like my father’s philippics, and surely left in a few verbal fuses lit specifically for his benefit. My father’s path, like that of all scientists, might be thought of as the personally-seeking-through-rationality, route to knowledge. These epistemological rivals—revelation and reason—have been at war (sometimes literally) for a long time—at least since Iranaeus took five volumes to excoriate the 2nd century heterodox Christians, but probably as far back as the beginnings of science-and- religion; perhaps to the advent of humanity…or further….

Thinking in this vein, we might consider how religion might spread. The image of a “virus” is an interesting one to be sure, and is lent credibility by an observation: While there are indeed some vertical aspects of religious traditions (that is, there is some correlation between the children’s religion and that of their parents), especially in vertically propagating religions such as Judaism, new recruits (conversions) are almost invariably horizontal. Stark makes this clear, and it also fits into psychologist Steven Pinker’s contention that people are far more socialized by their peers than by their parents. Still, how does this differ from the spread of other ideas, including those of science? Anthropologist Donald Brown famously published a list of human “universals”, those elements of humanity, like joke-telling, the use of figurative speech, and musical variation, common to all cultures. It seems to me that a putative virus could easily hop aboard any such vector, including such academic “universals” as scientific paradigms. But I await further exegesis on this point. (Science apologists and explainers contend that the big difference is that, scientific ideas, as opposed to religious ones, are subject to a rigorous shakeout, with only the “fittest” surviving. I agree, up to a point: It is also true that some brilliant scientific ideas never find a home [the ecological niche being already filled], never see the light of day [they are denied journal publication], or are even murdered “in utero” [dissertation advisors carry a lot of weight], simply because they do not fit into the currently reigning paradigm. There is verticality in the transmission of scientific ideas too!)

But there is an alternative to seeing things as faith versus scientific method. It is also possible to tilt one’s view of religion to the spiritual, the second aspect, above. Your grandmother was a Bible Belt farm girl who received her education (in Classics and Latin) at Wake Forest (best known, at the time, for its School of Divinity) during the Depression. She would always have described herself as religious. Yet, she loved teaching and the life of the mind (even though most of the minds she encountered were young ones), and had a midlife amour with geology which, after my father died, became a flaming passion, rounded out through flings with fossil hunting and archeology. Geology, of course, is a science not often considered compatible with her kind of early education. So beliefs within a person can evolve. In later years, Grandma, to my knowledge, never denied the possibility of an afterlife of some sort, but she did often say that it is silly to for the living to speculate about it (she sometimes did anyway), or to use such speculation to build a belief system around (she didn’t). Usually polite and charitable, she could sometimes be rather grouchy, like the time, shortly before she died, that she fulminated to me about her neighbors. It seems that they had been going on about her “immortal soul”, which she thought to be a contradiction in terms. Yet, she was, always, in awe of life, the universe, and everything—in her own way, wonderfully spiritual, ergo, on some level, wonderfully religious. In this way, the spiritual way, the gods can be genuinely profound, and even useful (and, maybe, even personally so, in a sense…?).

What kind of God? What varieties of gods, we might ask, are worth wanting? Feyman again:

“It doesn’t seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all the atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil—which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.” Not a play-acting Santa Claus, then.

The philosopher Baruch (AKA Benedict) Spinoza believed in what I think of as omnitheism: not a “top-down” puppet-master type of god, but, rather, a “bottom- up” deity that grows along with the unfolding of the universe. Spinoza was excommunicated for his failure to recant this conceit, but the famous physicist Albert Einstein once declared Spinoza’s the (only) type of god he could believe in. Michelangelo was just using artistic license, then.

A supreme deity of compassion? Of perfect order and universal harmony” It is worth quoting the philosopher David Hull at length (from his book, God of the Galapagos). “What kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by the species on Darwin’s Galápagos Islands? The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible waste, death, pain, and horror….Whatever the God implied by evolutionary theory…may be like, he is not the Protestant God of waste not, want not. He is also not the loving God who cares about his productions….The God of the Galápagos is careless, wasteful, indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray.” Job was whining to the wrong whirlwind, then.

In fact, it escapes me why any god should worry about our worries. Charles Darwin, the former candidate for the collar who found his calling (not to mention the start of his theory of natural selection) in those Galápagos Islands, was appalled by such unspeakable cruelties in nature that no deity that he could believe in would, in good conscience, perpetrate. There is the rub, of course: “Conscience” is a human construct, as are “waste”, “horror”, and “indifference”; they are not applicable to other levels of abstraction, including gods. As ex-journalist Terry Pratchett observes, God’s eye may be on the sparrow, but he doesn’t lift a finger to stop its fall. Or, we might also notice that, for all the yowling and screeching, there seems to be no shortage of kittens. And what is cruel to the perpetratee is just life to the perpetrator. Most levels of nature do not, can not possibly care about love, pain, and the whole damn’ thing as experienced by…us, say. So, let’s not take God too personally, shall we?

Or, at least, let’s not blame it all on “God”. You see, not everyone who BELIEVES believes in a supposedly stereotypical deity, one who is personal, supernatural, omnipresent, omniprescient, omnipotent, a Creator of universes who still makes house calls in the form of answering prayers, and probably a male. But who says “God” has to be stereotypical anyway? The word “God” has been “only” a metaphor for millennia (perhaps, even as long as the species has had “metaphors”), and, like most short words, a rather slippery metaphor at that. (Interestingly, parts of the Kabbalah—a collection of Jewish mysticism—claim that it is blasphemous to define, or even describe God.) Those who claim otherwise (by their lights, I must surely be an arch-atheist too!) I claim to be misusing the language, or, more precisely, engaging in “metaphoro-pathology”. (I mean this more literally and less facetiously than you might think!) But this is a rant for a rainy day. Let’s move on.

John Polkinghorne, a physicist who became an Anglican priest, said, “Those who are seeking understanding through and through— a natural instinct for the scientist—are seeking God, whether they name him or not.” His words, “seeking God”, are a giveaway to his position on the how-we-learn continuum. (I wonder how many garden-variety parishioners understand that detail?) This is, not so incidentally, the part of religion most attacked by scientists after the cosmology stuff: Do we, as discussed above, know what we know through faith alone (BAD), or by taking the effort to find out (GOOD)? It isn’t quite as simple as either side makes it, of course, as there really is a continuum here: Most everyone is a “reductionist” (a term often used pejoratively, but not so intended here) about some things, and something akin to “faith” is, after all, how scientists choose which questions to even ask of the universe.

Feynman’s biographer, James Gleick, suggests that scientists, as a class, have an antipathy toward the Sunday-school “God of the gaps”, “the last-resort explanation for the unexplainable, called on through the ages to fill holes in current knowledge….Feynman conceded the existence of genuine human knowledge outside the range of science…but…he saw a danger in tying moral guidance to unpalatable myths.” (“Myths”, in this sense, do not necessarily imply an untruth; rather, they are morally instructive stories with no meaningful basis in historical fact.) About that supposed antipathy to a “God of the gaps”: Maybe. The great evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky (who considered himself to be quite religious, by the way), explains: “ There are people…to whom the gaps in our understanding are pleasing….These people hope that the gaps will be permanent, and that what is unexplained will also remain inexplicable.” On the other hand, many scientists (especially, for some reason, physicists, like Stephen Hawking) invoke “God” for precisely this reason, as a filler metaphor for what they don’t know (yet).

So, scientists, even those who claim to be non-believers, often do, in fact, have some kind of “deistic” underpinnings, at least along the spiritual, numinous-ness continuum--but perhaps in their creation myths as well.. But this all depends on how matters are defined: Take note that such scientists’ personal concept of God (stated or otherwise) is far removed from the almost anthropomorphic foul-tempered, vengeful, and arbitrary rules-mongering Yahweh, the tribal god of the Israelites, who regularly interacted with humans, wrathfully punished backsliders, and encouraged ethnic cleansing. No, the concept of God has come a long way, even to non-scientists. Certainly, the Old Testament prophets would hardly recognize the God of later believers, a still somewhat anthropomorphic (to the Mormons, quite literally anthropomorphic), and still transcendent deity, but one who by now has evolved into the Lord of all Creation (although, in actual practice, we tend to box Him, with purposeful capitalization, into a rather tribal arena; He is more useful that way, especially when we need to separate ourselves from the OTHER GUYS). (God with a history? An evolving God? Oh, yes. Today, most people who claim to be believers probably like to think of the One God, immortal and eternal. But it wasn’t always so (!), even in the Bible. The creation story of Genesis mentions gods in the plural—elohim, in Hebrew. Likewise, The Ten Commandments, comprising a contract between the Hebrews who left Egypt and Yahweh [apparently Abraham’s tribal deity], presuppose multiple gods. Joshua gave the followers of Moses a choice: They could worship a) the old Egyptian gods, b) the gods of Canaan [which territory the Israelites would raze and claim as their own], or c) Yahweh [they were not allowed to use that name, of course], with the only condition that if they chose c), then didn’t live up to their commitment, they would be in seriously bad trouble. All this is well and fascinatingly discussed in The History of God, by Karen Armstrong, who teaches comparative religion in London.)

Speaking for myself, I find the idea of a personal, transcendent, and anthropomorphic God to be at least un-useful and distasteful, even borderline blasphemous. (“Transcendent” refers to something that is beyond human rationality. A transcendent God has no obligation to adhere to the laws—either moral or physical—that are imposed upon mortals. So, such a God can make or break rules according to exigencies of the moment; supernatural events become, therefore, no problem—and even preferred. I have deep qualms about this as a working concept. A transcendent God is, it seems to me, a very bad idea, one not worth believing in. A proper God lives within his, hers, or its own rules.)

Howbeit, this being a far stickier, and more aesthetics-based subject than most, I’m not so convinced of my eternal correctness (“eternal, ever since Wednesday”, as Dylan Thomas said) that I wish to require everyone to believe as I do (as I sometimes say, everyone’s entitled to his or her own erroneous opinion). That would not be merely silly, but incredibly stupid as well. God—as I view God, and also as our culture views “God”, will, along with associated metaphors, continue to evolve. It is true that “the more we know, the more we know that we don’t know.” Around 1900, physicists believed that our knowledge of how the universe works was pretty well complete. We just had to tie up a couple of loose ends and….And then along came relativity and quantum mechanics, and….And science went wacko. Does this prove that knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, is useless because it will soon be superseded? To me, there is no such lesson. Rather, it behooves us all—fundamentalists and poets along with scientists—to retain a large portion of humility. That is all, and that is everything: When we don’t know the scope of our knowledge, whatever we choose to represent the unknown, in a universe where the possibilities expand faster than we can possibly even identify, let alone understand them, can have no limits. Is this a “God of the Gaps” I am talking about? Perhaps, but one I can well understand. (A God of the gaps is, to be sure, unappealing when one requires crisp definitions for rhetorical purposes. But is this necessary, or even desirable? Not always, perhaps. As I suggested earlier, “God” works best as a loose metaphor. A “God of the gaps”, then, becomes useful as a meta-metaphor!)

What I cannot easily abide, in addition to the transcendent God of the religious right, is the warm fuzzy one of what I might call (in a non-political way) the religious left—the “poets” who refuse to engage, in contemporary parlance, the left side of their brains. Here, as cited by Gleick, is the rest of Feynman’s footnote:

“Poets say that science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms….Far more marvelous is the truth [of how the universe works] than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do not the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter as if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”

(I don’t mean to trash poets as a class, of course. Indeed, much beauty, and perhaps much truth, can be found in such a worldview, as Feynman himself knew. The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams also claimed to be an atheist, albeit for different reasons, I suspect, than Feynman. Still, he wrote much sacred music of soul-boggling sublimity. My own feeling is that the both avowed atheists were in fact closer to the MIND OF GOD than an ark-load of the most fervent of fundamentalists.)

Facts are, more or less, facts, and science is particularly successful in ferreting them out—at least enough to relegate favorite myths to the realms of metaphor and archetype. Naturally, the responsible scientist refuses to make an alternate religion out of mere knowledge, so it should be possible to argue facts without resorting to cultural warfare. Unhappily, this seems to not always be the case. For one thing, scientists are, like everyone else, human, and necessarily live very human lives outside academe. Many, in fact, make their livings in decidedly unscientific (in the academic sense) commercial ways, which has its own set of problems. (It is worth noting that science was, until the last four hundred years or so, a branch of academic theology, and the practice of it still retains many of the original structural forms: a professorial “priest” class, “altar boys” [undergraduate students], acolytes [graduate students], seminarians [post-docs], the laity that pays the bills, and even a “pope” of sorts: the currently favored worldview, or “paradigm”. Indeed, even the quest for at-the-bottom-of-it all rules that most cosmologists indulge in [physicist Steven Weinberg titled a book Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature] seems suspiciously theological. Then too, not all scientists check their own “human nature” at the ivory tower’s door, and viciously fractious professional hissing, spitting, clawing, wauling, yawping, and mewling are not uncommon, as is recurring rampant rutting.)

Perhaps, then, there truly is a “shirts and skins” kind of aesthetic component to both theological and scientific hostilities: “I don’t really care about the facts behind your beliefs; the point is, they are not, to me, beautiful enough, and, by the way, you aren’t either.” If this were shown to be a major element in religious (or scientific) argument (every conflagration needs both a spark and a reservoir of combustible material; what I am discussing here is the former), it would make me very sad. But how else do we explain Hitler? Or the Rape of Nanking? Or the Armenian Holocaust? Or the annihilation of the American Indians? Or, in an every day sense, any argument (be it political or personal) with an obvious or hidden emotional appeal? Aesthetics seems to be one very good way, after all, to judge who is “one of US”, and who is not.

Come to think of it, maybe this is the human universal that, even today, binds both disciplines—and, perversely and oxymoronically, the Ring of Power that binds us all: the tribal imperative, Us and Them. There is, indeed, much literature in psychology that points out that humans separate into rival camps at the drop of a hat (almost literally!), for little or no important reason. (Collectively, this is sometimes referred to as the Stanford Effect, after some scary psychological research at that institution.) Aesthetics, in this way of thinking, could be just the “perfect impurity” in the crystal, the war whoop of a family, tribe, a sect, an academic faction. Religion bashers often point out, correctly, that, historically, religion has served this tribalizing role as efficiently and loyally as Bertie Wooster’s valet, Jeeves, but to, often, hugely more lethal effect. Religion was, in fact, the rallying cry behind the crusades, and remains the loudest call to arms for all sorts of contemporary atrocities. Still, I’m not yet ready to blame religious proclivities any more than I could blame aesthetic sensibilities, per se. I once wrote of bit of doggerel which mused on tribal competitions, their usual outcomes, and a (possibly) facetious solution. For what it’s worth, here it is, along with the prose introduction:

There is, perhaps, too much news to read these days, and depressingly little of it is good. It’s worse than a jungle out there, for, in a jungle, there are simple reasons and explanations for what goes on: Hunger demands satisfaction, and it is only question of strength, or time, who is the lunch-or and who is the lunch-ee. In human “civilizations”, the situation is considerably more complex. As a rhetorical basis for conflict, “he started it by hitting me back” has traditionally enjoyed a great deal of popularity among contestants. But this approach can lead to global trouble in a day of rapid communication [and this was before the widespread popularity of the internet!]. Tribal warfare is, therefore, obsolete in many ways. But tribes continue to study war, with ethnicity providing the dogmatic underpinnings. How can we get anything worthwhile accomplished if we have to spend all our time worrying about genocide, fratricide, matricide, and all the little cides? Is there any way out? Cogitating about the affairs in various parts of the world, I think I’ve hit on something. In the spirit of Jonathan Swift, I offer: A Modest Proposal, 1993.

Jets, McCoys, and Capulets
To Sharks, Hatfields, and Montagues—
All of a kind, its perspective we lack.

Blame must be laid, yes?
Pass on the gist of our reviews:
“He started it by hitting me back!”

I, to each clan, tribe, and nation
Wishing cult’ral insulation,
Proffer a repudiation
First,then a reccomendation:

Historical condemnation
Is no basis for elation.
We’re in it for the duration;
Think, thus, homogenization!

So, my friends, the true salvation’s
Compuls’ry miscegenation….

Now, however, I’m not so sure. It seems certain that, if all religion and ethnicity were banned today, humanity would find another set of criteria upon which to make tribalistic assessments that serve as vectors for the putative malignant “viruses” of destructive hatred. (It bears repeating that any human tendency, whether genetic or cultural in origin, can be such a transmission path. But “viruses”—ideas—can be either bad or good. That is to say, in the present context, that cooperation—“team sprit”—can be put to both constructive and destructive uses.)

Is there any out? According to philosopher Peter Singer, the key to a mature way to deal with this might be to find a way to enlarge one’s “moral circle”, who is US. Can this be done? We must, I believe, hope so. But this will depend on how well we can re-train our minds that received their default structures over the long haul of evolution, most of which was nothing like today’s world. In other words, to enlarge one’s moral circle is not intuitive; it is hard work, requiring a good deal of specialized education. This is one thing that science has going for it—knowing how to educate. But I’m not convinced that it knows, yet, what to educate. (My own conjecture is that circles tend to close—that is, the border between US and THEM gets less porous—during times of environmental [or economic or social] stresses [Calvin hypothesizes a kind of “pumping action”: Many rounds of ice ages, say, would favor increasing proportions of “cooperators” in populations]. This tendency, if true, could be, and surely has been, seized on and manipulated for political and socioeconomic gain.)

I trust that, among persons of honest good will (that is, among those who can, with effort, overcome parochial tendencies and enlarge their moral circles), the working assumption can always be that a person’s beliefs, however stupid or silly they may seem, are at least sincere. Having said that, I further suggest that it behooves humans of good will and intellectual integrity to use all their cognitive faculties and analytical powers to seek out answers, including religious answers, consistent with what is known. (The above statement could easily be spoken by all scientists, except that many would substitute the word “moral” for “religious”.) My feeling is that you would agree with this concept, as would BF. So, while you two may indeed have different cosmologies, they can and must be discussed rationally, and you may even find him knowing a bit about the subject. (Richard Dawkins, a zoologist best known for his provocative writings on evolution theory [he popularized the “virus”, or, “meme”, as he termed it, concept], quotes one scientist arguing with another, “You know, we really agree. It is just that you say it wrong!” Dawkins then chides his own detractors: “…you know, we really do almost agree….It is just that you see it wrong!” [Dawkins, by the way, also claims to be an atheist. Yet, intriguingly, he said, in The Blind Watchmaker, that he couldn’t imagine anyone being an atheist before Charles Darwin wrote down how evolution must work. Is he, perhaps, saying, “Your god isn’t big enough; take mine!”?) Where the two of you are more likely to differ on purely emotional grounds may be over what I earlier called “liturgy”—that is, ceremony and ritual. I know that, for you, the rituals of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and all the rest, are of crucial importance—whether or not they are “religious” in origin. BF’s personal culture, and his family history, may be a lot different than yours. So it becomes necessary to cut each other some slack (or, if you can’t…). Again, apart from an increasingly obsolete tribal imperative, nothing is to be gained by arguing taste (unless, of course, you are a paid critic). “Okay”, you might say to yourself, “I like bowling, he likes basket weaving. So what?” Mature people really can deal with these things.

Where there can be no compromise is, of course, is where the pedal of the desire- to-know hits the metal of faith—which we all have, at some point—that is, there can be no compromise on morality, or, more precisely, on one’s personal sense of rightness. If one person fervently and honestly believes in the fundamental correctness of gun ownership, for instance, while another believes, just as strongly, the opposite, there can be no middle ground. But I doubt that you and BF are anywhere near those positions on any matter of lasting import. (Please note that I give “morality” short shrift in a discussion about religion. The fact is that, wherever the “faith line” is drawn, religion truly is not synonymous with morality: The moral tenets of non-religious people are, these days (in the past, there apparently were fewer openly non-believing people), as strong—and as weak—as those of believers. (Having said that, however, I hasten to add that, in my opinion, a moral/ethical system that acknowledges and is informed by what is known on evidentiary grounds seems [at least I hope this is so!] to have a better chance of lasting in today’s world than one which claims that all laws stem from a transcendent deity.

Indeed, I would make the point that a doctrinal, dogmatic belief is, in an important way, antithetical to truly moral thought; thus reliance upon doctrine cannot be how most people—at least not my favorite people—make moral decisions. The reasons for this are twofold: In the philosophical traditions, moral decisions are based on “free will”, free choice, regardless of whether the freedom is real or merely apparent. To the extent that one operates through doctrine, then, there can be no freely decided actions. The second reason is more fundamental. Dogma, whether religious or otherwise, presupposes a predictable, knowable future: You do this; there are known consequences; you do another thing, there are other known consequences. However, in the real universe, it is not possible to know the complete future in any meaningful way. Those things you cannot predict vastly outnumber those things you think you can. Yet we go ahead in life anyway. This does not mean that there is no place for a common mission statement, a group ethos, even a tribal dogma. But it is important to understand that conformity and uniformity are merely tools for smooth social functioning; they do not directly represent anything like “virtue”. Like all tools, they are agnostic as to value, including moral value. That is, they can be used for either “good” or “evil”, without consideration of moral concerns.

There is one more issue, a side issue, perhaps along the lines of apologetics, or, why-religion-deserves-to-still-exist, that I would like to touch upon briefly. Here, I am again thinking about both spiritual matters and aesthetics. I feel strongly that it is legitimate to take a scientific view of religious and aesthetic concerns. At the same time,it is important to understand that there is beauty in the best of science. The latter, like all things important to humans, can be and should be poetic, even musical. In that regard, I am being only slightly facetious when I say that the rest of religion can go to hell, just leave me the music. I cannot imagine anyone believing in a literal heaven without knowing certain works intimately. To me, it would be more than a profound embarrassment, perhaps even grounds for summary exclusion, to fill out St. Peter’s pre-entry assessment form and not be able to, under the REPERTOIRE heading, list, say, Brahms’ German Requiem, Bach’s Magnificat and B Minor Mass, many of the German chorales and Welsh and Appalachian hymn tunes, the fugueing tunes of William Billings, works of Purcell, Gibbons, Vaughan Williams, Gutiérrez de Padilla.…all of which had at least religious inspiration, if not, originally, liturgical implementation. I know, I know, Hitler was inspired by Wagner. Should that doom a Ring lover? (Something should, perhaps, but let’s not go down that road right now.) I realize this is a personal thing, but how can what is numinous and aesthetic not be so, at least in part? Architecture? Try the Duomo of Florence, St. Peter’s in Rome, St. Mark’s in Venice, St. Paul’s in London, St. Isaac’s in St. Petersburg, the Cathedrals of Chartres, Trondheim, and Mexico City—and that is only in the Western religious tradition. We won’t even start with visual art. Anyway, the point is that, on a strictly private basis, I can forgive the Church a lot of sins (maybe) for what is sublime because of it. Too, we can make a strong case that science, as we know it today, could not possibly exist without its religious ancestry. Does this suggest the argument, then, an adolescent one that the Old Folks are stupid? This is, at my age, something I wish to avoid discussing, but…I won’t stop you from thinking about it….

Lastly, my dear child, I wish to share my own feeling that the mark of good religion, exactly like that of good science, is that it is not afraid to have doubts, to not know. Indeed, I personally mistrust all belief systems and world views that are too sure of their own eternal correctness, especially about the meaning of the universe and our place in it. One more favorite Feynman-ism:

“You see…I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which may be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here….I really don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any [apparent] meaning….It doesn’t frighten me.”

In the end, the issue isn’t really about how we believe the universe is unfolding. That is an empirical matter that we now seek empirical explanations for. And liturgy, the temporal ceremonial avatar of our aesthetic urges, is partly—largely—a social thing. Faith vs. reason represent a vital public discussion, along with questions of ethics and social values. But the numinous, the spiritual….that we—I—see with James to be intensely individual. At last, we all have to make our personal peace, or war, with the depths of nature. And this is, if anything is, beyond ultimate understanding, beyond telling, and beyond, in any human sense, time. This is where we learn, where I feel we must practice science; this, finally, is where we find God.

Love,
Dad

Let 'em Dance (in the Aisles)

Thu, 3 Jan 2008 13:41:10 -0800

In a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece, Dan Levitin suggests that music, biologically, cannot be separated from dance, and bemoans the evolution of concert hall traditions that unnaturally require a strict dichotomy of active performers and passive (once they’ve paid for their tickets and settled into their seats) listeners.

In my opinion, Levitin’s plaint is reasonably valid, up to a point: To the extent that it exists, non-participation of the audience does seem, well, not what nature would “prefer”. And yet, I feel that his discussion has something of a straw-man flavor to it, positing a thing that doesn’t quite exist in order to pummel it.

It is true that music halls and their associated performance traditions are very recent cultural inventions. In fact, they could not have begun without a prosperous yet non-elite social class. Though there were a few earlier exceptions, the solid “middle class”, as an enduring institution, was pretty much a post-renaissance novelty in human history. It is interesting to note that concert hall music traditions share many features with other performing arts, like the theater, oratory, political and athletic events, circus, lecture hall teaching, and, come to think of it, book writing—particularly the strict separation of professional or semi-professional presenters and the much more numerous bill-paying (but otherwise relatively passive) audience members, the “customer base”. (Cf. the Greek odea and Roman gladiatorial arenas.) Moreover, it must be pointed out that such class divergences were not possible in hunter-gatherer societies which were, presumably, ubiquitous until the advent of city-state social structures. The latter organizational style, with its large and storable resources, for the first time in human history allowed (certain technologies pending) the development of professional classes—of priests, scribes, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers, and of full-time performing artists. Of course, the phrase, “don’t give up your day job”, surely came into being about the same time, as artists could hardly play to the masses until those masses could afford to keep their idols in clover. That took the aforementioned prosperous but non-elite classes (i.e., neither the nobility nor full-time laborers).

So, yes, a performer-participant/spectator-customer dichotomy is “odd”, in that it seems to deviate from what we presume to be the standard for our ancestral forbears. (This is, to be sure, the case with most everything in the cultural domain.) But in an evolutionary sense, are dance and music truly one dissociable entity? That contention is debatable, Levitin’s (and John Blacking’s) assertions of such throughout cross-cultural history notwithstanding. In fact, many postulated precursors of music have little to do with dance-like movement. Dancing, in Levitin’s sense, at least, emphasizes (often ritualistic) group participation in an extreme calorie-consuming form. Thus, it must have been very “costly” in terms of biological fitness, requiring huge potential “pay-outs”, such as a large probability of increase not only in individual fitness but group competencies as well—success in inter-tribal conflicts in particular.

These martial competencies, while important in the long run (as is national security nowadays), are not everyday necessities, which are better served by other postulated music precursors. These include the caretaker-infant mutual bonding hypothesis (championed by Ellen Dissenayake, Colwyn Trevarthen, and Dean Falk, among others; some forms of singing and dancing may well modulate dopamine levels, the “feel good“ neurotransmitter, but other forms modulate levels of oxytocin, the “bonding” hormone); the “grooming and gossip” hypothesis (favored by Robin Dunbar); cross-generational histories (consider the ubiquity of folk ballads and epic narratives—cf, West African griot traditions); conflict resolution (by, among other things, mutual entrainment of emotions—something that music seems very good at); certain forms of sexual selection (e.g., female signaling that features clarity and a good range of voice, indicative of youth, fecundity, and mothering skills, and male signaling suggestive, via vocal stylings, of nurturing willingness); development of fine motor skills (perhaps those of vocal mechanisms were critical for language development); and over-all cognitive-affect development (the well-rehearsed brain hypothesis). [I hope to provide an extended review of these posited precursors in a later post.]

In this view, some music has “always been a communal activity”, but certainly not all. To be fair, Levitin does give passing reference to these other aspects of what we think of as “music”, but then it is back to emphasizing “full-body aerobic[s]”. Again, I have no cavil with the importance of music-as-dance for large-group bonding, aggressive intra- and inter-group signaling. (Intra-group bonding can be a tricky issue, however: Long term relationships among members of orchestras—and rock groups—require an interplay between cooperation and competition; they can and do become famously fractious.) Nevertheless, concerning Levitin’s discomfort with concert hall traditions, I feel that a few observations are in order.

First, the idea that audience members sit “in rapt attention with their hands folded quietly in their laps”, though stereotypical, is certainly not historically accurate (anecdotes abound of noisily cheering—or grumping—audiences throughout most of the music hall era; cf. the famous “riot” at the premiere of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps), and is an overstatement and far from universal even in current practice. A cursory glance around at a chamber music performance, or even at a (usually) far stodgier symphony concert, will reveal a fair amount of physical activity, such as head weaving, foot tapping, covert conducting and other gentle arm waving, and, of course, applauding (and not always at the “officially prescribed” times). While these “activities” may appear contemptuously subtle to Levitin’s sensibilities, they seem to me more of a reflection of not only conventional decorum, but also the fact that “classical” performances generally play to more older (and, perhaps, more musically trained) audiences than does, say, Ludacris. (Sexual selection theories note that “full-body aerobic” dancing is generally a youthful activity. That is, it is mostly practiced by those of mate-seeking ages—not that much different than what you see in rock or hip-hop concert settings.) In any case, it is notable that performances of driving, highly rhythmic works (such as Le Sacre du Printemps and Ravel’s “Bolero”) elicit a higher degree of physical involvement, perhaps correlated with the conductor’s histrionic gesture level, even among the most geriatric of audience members.

Secondly, contemporary rock concerts are hardly devoid of the performer-audience divide. Indeed, for security, and, perhaps, quasi-religious reasons, the chasm is often much deeper in the pop genre. But if, in the latter case, noisier audience participation is the standard, much of the difference can be attributed, I think, to the fact that Ludacris et al. are jacked up by a gazillion amps of current flowing through many kilo-bucks worth of loudspeaker arrays. Thus, the differences in sound pressure levels between contributions from the stage and audience are probably similar for all genres. That is, if the average SPL at a Ludacris concert is 115 dB measured at, say, 10 meters from the main stack, while the audience contribution would amount to, maybe 80 dB (if it could be measured at all), the 35 dB difference is about the same as the likely 80/45 dB ratio in the concert hall. Too, it should be pointed out that pop genre presentations typically have a much narrower dynamic range than is the norm for the concert hall. Thus, to shout “yeah!” at the stretto of Copland’s Third Symphony might make perfect sense; but so would ecstatic silence during a stunningly pianissimo adagio from Mahler 5.

So, should we, in the name of being true to our biological roots and freeing ourselves from oppressive cultural conditions, abandon concert hall traditions as they have evolved? I, for one, am leery of over-investing in the applicability of our primitive selves to life in the world today. Those same “biological roots” may need a strong cultural overlay (indeed, those roots must have, in some sense, prepared the way for culture as we know it), without which most societal activities as we practice them today would not be possible, be those related to music, or to science, or to medicine, or to politics, or to diplomacy, or to economics….Could we today, without that cultural overlay, without destructive turmoil handle our proclivities toward tribalism and exclusivism? Could we study the realities of the physical universe? Could we mitigate the pain of injury and disease for so much of our present population? Could we rejoice in the vast knowledge afforded by great libraries of written documentation, a possibility impossible to dream of when our biological roots were laid down? I have nothing against physical expressions of joy, of pleasure, of pain…of all the emotions music is capable of engendering. Those, too, are, in specificity, cultural, aesthetic choices. Nevertheless, from this perspective, the idea of a redesigning Avery Fisher Hall to include a mosh pit does not seem to me at all liberating.

Everything You Need to Know You Learn in the Trenches

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:25:26 -0800

My Daughter relates an experience that makes me chuckle and, thinking of its metaphorical extension, grimace. Amy belongs to the Mountaineers, which recently held a work party to prep the Meany Lodge on Stampede Pass for its upcoming winter activities. For some reason, it was decided to relocate a a large boulder; apparently it was in violation of someone’s sense of what precise route would be ideal for a drainage ditch. Now, a rock’s whole life, as it were, its very raison d’etre, is to remain in one and only one spot. This particular stone—apparently idolizing the ungrammaticality of Sammy Davis, Jr.—determined to defy and disdain (or at least disregard) the intentions of both hell and high water—not to mention unclued humanity. In the event, all manual attempts to dislodge it were frustrated. A Bobcat was brought in to do the honors; it proceeded to become mired in the mud. Wary of sinking even deeper into the quagmire with nothing to show for the collective troubles but more and messier vexation, the group’s leader declared, “Forget it. Let’s go get a beer.”

My thought is this: If our national leaders could only assimilate this lesson, or even acknowledge the practicality and instructiveness of its conclusion, I would be ecstatic to buy the first round.

Spandrels, Cheesecake, More Sex, and Music

Thu, 1 Nov 2007 12:38:58 -0700

These notes are in response to the last chapter of Dan Levitin’s book, This Is Your Brain on Music. It seems that Steven Pinker asserted, in his 1997 keynote presentation to the Society for Music Perception and Cognition conference, that music seems to be an evolutionary artifact, that there is no obvious adaptational value for its cognitive participation (indeed, Pinker suggests that music is “auditory cheesecake”: tasty, but non-nutritious, adaptationally speaking. Levitin disagrees, though he notes that anyone with Pinker’s stature as a scientist needs to be listened to seriously. In Levitin’s view, music (especially the part of music we call “dance”) could well be an element of sexual selection, much like peacock’s tail and the stag’s antlers: They may not, in themselves, demonstrate anything overtly adaptive, but they do show a more generalized cognitive ability, which would, presumably, confer greater overall fitness.

Still, I am guessing that many working in the field will not be satisfied with this. It is natural, I think, for a researcher to consider his or her own field from a defensive viewpoint. Nonetheless, I agree with Levitin’s contention that music must be adaptive in the Darwinian sense, perhaps through sexual selection (which was, after all, an important component of Darwin’s scheme), perhaps preceding the development of language. Please note, however, that I do not say this from that defensive stance: I love music, and I love language. Even more, I love discovery. Howbeit, I am convinced that regardless of how the issue of adaptational primacy is settled, Pinker’s view, while admirably provocative, cannot really be sustained in light of several lines of research and thought. (Nor, in my view, does this make any difference; more about this later.)

Levitin’s point that sexual selection is likely at work is very well taken, though it is important to note that, unlike with much of the animal kingdom, this cuts both ways, gender-wise, in humans.

(My own youth attests to this: I was always attracted to musicians, and I eventually married a violist. As to the early stages of sexual exploration, playing in the band was, like competing in the debate club, a perfect alternate path to social success, or at least medium-okay esteem. We nerdish geeks were entirely non-competitive against the jocks and popular super-stars, but in our small pond, we could still preen: By going to All-State we could still show the opposite sex that we had, at least in some areas, what it took.

(Even better, of course, was to play dance dates—preferably at other schools where we could strut without, presumably, our parochial lack of stud-cred proactively damning our modus operandi, Best of all was to join a regional orchestra. While the jocks were strictly local, our social circles could be relatively cosmopolitan—itself something of a turn-on, especially as we needed to drive long distances, away from direct parental influences—tapping the cognitively best from a wide (albeit shallow) social milieu.

(The only problem was that, at the end of the day, or evening, we were still just competent geeks. I remember, with some minor pain to this day, the Dear Al: “You are the kind of guy I would eventually like to marry, but for now, I just want to have fun.” Can we say, I in essence thought, though the term was still many years in the future, “Evolutionary Psychology 101?”)

One enduring mystery of human evolution is why the neocortical regions of the brain grew so fast. Random mutations cannot account, most evolution theorists assert, for the required evolutionary speed; what propelled that development? Sexual selection provides a reasonable candidate explanation, as it is known that top-down mechanisms (which is what aesthetic processes such as sexual selection are all about!) can greatly facilitate and catalyze environmental tracking. True, unless they are well-constrained, top-down paradigms come with a whiff of teleology, a definite taboo in the culture of evolution theory—the blind watchmaker and all that. (Cultural evolution is, by the way, also very much top-down, at least from the genome’s perspective.) Nevertheless, a good case can be made, I feel, that sexual selection is a likely contributor to rapid cortex development, and that music is a positive marker for that process. After all, we know that, regardless of whether music is adaptive in the same sense as language, it does require prodigious cognitive skills. And some kinds of “aesthetic sense” are found in other species whose beginnings are much older than human language development. (Whether or not music as we know it predates human language, and whether or not it exists in other species, emotion and ritual certainly do; too, both are, in fact, integral to human musical forms.)

My own feeling is that language and music are only recently differentiated, cognitively and neurologically speaking, both scaffolding upon earlier mechanisms. Further, much of the modern brain’s evolutionary development, I conjecture, is due to these incipient skills (along with a few others) competing for neurological resources and cognitive primacy. That is, they have co-evolved. A putative arms race notwithstanding, I maintain that cognition, like every other complex system, performs best (and most robustly) as a “community”, or, to use William James’ term, an “ensemble” of modules, which would again suggest co-evolution: What good is a king without a working kingdom? Also, music may just be a really good cognitive neighbor (and not just to language; think, for instance, what expertise in counterpoint could buy you).

Withal, what if Pinker is right? What if music is just a “spandrel”, an evolutionary artifact? So what, indeed: What could this possibly mean to the modern brain (or the hunter-gatherer brain of 50K years ago)? I say, “not much” (nor does it suggest a validity to the “auditory cheesecake” image), and my thesis comes, in large part, from Darwin himself in his discussion of conversion of function. Any evolutionary development, whether directly adaptational or artifactual is, truly, “accidental”. (So is, in the literal sense, all bottom-up natural selection.) Thus it can be pounced upon by the exigencies of tracking. After all, genetic mutations are themselves artifacts of a variation process, and higher-order artifacts are precisely higher-order variations (aka exaptations, to use Gould’s neologism) subject to the pressures of natural selection!

We can take this further. A “folk axiom” in biology (“folk”, because most everyone believes it to exemplify some basic truth even though it is not stated formally) says that whenever there a a large reservoir of a resource, some life form will evolve to exploit it. To this, I add a couple of conditions: There must be a reliable source of energy; so, too, a generator of variation. When we put these together—a resource pool, a source of variation, and a way to power the machine—we are pretty much describing the chain of life. Moreover, the process can be taken as a metaphor that dramatically widens the very definition of life, since “resource” can be just about anything: money, political gullibility, vestigial cognitive quirks like jealousy and professional envy, noxious weeds (think tobacco), craving of excitement, blood-lust, economic hopes, hedonistic gratification...whatever. When we add in the generation of exaptation to provide variability the recursive feedback that inevitably attends all turbulent systems (i.e., emergent phenomena)....Well, that is another discussion!

What is an artifact” What is artifactual? I argue that everything that becomes adaptive per Darwin began its career an an “accident”. Is play adaptive? It surely is now, and is, apparently, a universal for at least most terrestrial vertebrates. How about modern science? Well, not to our ancestral genome, at least, or it would have been so encoded. Yet it is surely useful these days, though—for now—its vectors are social and cultural, not genetic. Religion? Politics? I think a good case (though, perhaps not a definitive one) can be made that both predate language—and even the human species (cf. Frans de Waal). Whatever the case, unlike academic cognitive psychology (and linguistics), both are human universals.

However, then, music started out, it, in its various forms, is almost certainly an integral part of the “modern” brain’s firmware (or “wetware”). This, of course, can also be inferred from a perusal of Donald Brown’s list of human universals. My feeling is that, since the cognitive community has coexisted successfully for a long time, coming to grips, as it were, with its diversity, music now (usually) complements, rather than competes with language. (Hey, they both have their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to dealing with the outside world.) But how, exactly, this construction may act to build the holistic mind is a subject for another day.

(See also http://www.amc-music.com/news/articles/mystery.htm for an overview of news articles on the controversy.)

The Politics of Falling Tides

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 11:20:47 -0700

Well, we’re all “elitists” of some stripe. Politically, we may be liberal, whiney-ass urban intellectual elitists, or conservative, whiney-ass let’s-stomp a terrorist-today redneck elitists—or whatever favorite effete stereotype you want to believe in. So, in one sense, it’s all about which team to root for. This is so even when the stakes are more dire and more permanent than suggested by “just a game”.

Which, assuming the dubious accuracy and appropriateness of the stereotypes, is better, then—the fuzzy-headed idealistic condescensions of the so-called liberals, or the in-your-face and down-your–throat posturings of the so-called values-oriented conservatives?

My own conjecture is that the former thrives in an expanding economy, with the latter becoming the dominant asset—milkable for shear numbers, at least, when woes and travails are at least locally increasing.

There are straightforward reasons behind this idea: Good times are rising tides that lift all boats—some more than others, to be sure, but most everyone is a little better off, and therefore able to indulge in some reflection. Bad times, on the other hand, are falling tides: Most people are worse off, though some are better off, and a few are much better off, but the latter attain their status at the expense of the sinking minority. In this context, the best way to claw and scramble is as a group—a collective. That is, in bad times populations tend toward social conservatism, clumping around the nearest dogma. In other words, the borders of one’s circle become firmer.

William Calvin (A Brain for All Seasons) suggests a kind of “pumping” action that forces the evolution of cooperation among humans. In an ice age, say, when resources were scarce, those who survived the best were the incipient cooperators. After a few rounds of such travails and challenges, cooperation had become more or less a culturally well-oiled machine, so to speak, and possibly even hard-wired into the genome. What Calvin doesn’t mention is this mechanism is precisely what is needed to bring religion into prominence, one of the principal elements of religion being a common, group ethic—cooperation. Rodney Stark, in fact, posits just this mechanism as the driving force behind the rapid rise of Christianity, from a few desperate souls at the time of the Temple’s destruction to a near-majority during the reign of Constantine (see The Rise of Christianity). A darker way for this cooperative impetus is as an us/them dualism—a way to tell who is on which team.

So, dogmatic religion is clearly adaptive, and most obviously so during hard times.

All this is highly ironic, of course, in that a major tenet of modern fundamentalism is its aversion to evolutionary explanations of just about everything. To be sure, this aversion makes a certain amount of sense on several levels, though for present purposes it is enough to note that some seed tenet is required for a dogma to serve the needs of group cohesion. In this regard, what I am leading up to is that those who live by dogma are vulnerable to the abuses of it. That is, dogma is an exploitable resource in the hands of politicians and other manipulators of minds. Dogma is, after all, a kind of shortcut (like stereotypes, representational language, and other things…). And shortcuts evolve because there is a supreme economic advantage in using them: Analyzing turtles all the way down is costly; making as assumption about the appropriate levels of turtles is relatively cheap.

At least, this approach seems to be optimal for hunter-gatherer humans, for whom our now-antique brains were customized. Whether it is appropriate nowadays is much less clear, since the societal, economic, geographic, and military contexts have changed far more than the genotype. Or, rather, my real concern is that the professional politicians/marketers/spin-doctors are a step or two ahead of the population which is used as fodder for the ravenous maw of The Machine. It is an arms race favored to favor, as it always does, certain political types.

But, whatever the political system, there is a Tragedy of the Commons in its longevity: After some period of existence, a system will cease to exist for its original purpose, no matter how idealistic it was at its genesis, and begin existing only to make itself larger. (Not-so incidentally, this is also the definition of a malignancy.) Hence, of necessity, it will preemptively grab all the resources it can, before anything else can challenge it.

This is not so troublesome in a growing economy. As noted earlier, a rising tide lifts all boats—some more, some less. But in a falling, or even a stable economy (which, of course, is also “falling” so long as more and more participants want a piece of the action), the professional grabbers really come into their inheritances.

In a democracy, ballots are the milk that nourishes the political system, and the voters are the cows. And domesticated cows provide by far the both the best return on investment, and the best quality product. Thus, in terms of my metaphor, during the down times, the economy bifurcates into a few farmers (not to disparage non-metaphorical agriculturalists!) and many cows: Ergo, feudalism, the dynamic imperative of troubled times, and one of the tyrannies despised and feared by the nation’s founders.

There are no young redwoods in a mature forest; the elders have co-opted the available sunlight before the youth could establish roots. A new stand requires a catastrophic fire. So, too, the removal of the old, corrupt, inefficient, diseased (and, therefore, inappropriate) human political system usually requires revolution. Yet it is not clear that, these days, a “real” revolution would do the trick, or what such a revolution would even look like. We know how changes occurred in the former Soviet Union and its client states, but it is not obvious that the changes were, ultimately, for the “better”, or even more stable.

There is much to ponder here….

The Genocidal Way of Things

Thu, 24 May 2007 21:12:51 -0700

I went to lunch with a composer friend whose Jewish grandparents had survived and fled from the pogroms endemic to Eastern Europe in the 19th an early 20th Centuries. Before we got to the car, the discussion began: “Hitler's and German's real war was against the Jews….”

“But what about the homosexuals and the disabled and the Jehovah's Witnesses…."

"Ah, but that isn't about race.”

“Okay, then, what about the Gypsies?”

“That wasn't about race either. You have to remember that the principle behind being a Gypsy is that you have to lie and steal….”

I thought, “___, do you hear what you are saying? Do you hear?”

Forget the blatant, if unnoticed racism from one otherwise wonderful, intelligent, even righteous person who, now deceased, cannot defend himself.. There is, I think, a strain of exclusivism, of a certain kind of privilege, in all of us, the ugliness of which can get triggered too easily and thoughtlessly. At one event I worked, the numbers were in the program notes: The famous Six Million Jews, and…maybe 200,000 Gypsies….

The figure cited for the Gypsy Holocaust deaths comes apparently comes from Lucy Dawidowicz (The war Against the Jews) or her sources. But most historians I have read are of the opinion that, for a variety of reasons, this is most surely wrong, both in specificity and in its range. In the first place it is difficult to say definitively either how many Roma and Sinti lived in pre-Holocaust Europe (because of the lack of a thorough census), or how many died during the Porrajmos—the “devouring”, the Roma equivalent of Sho’ah. In the latter regard, the much of the documentation was never brought into the light (the Roma peoples had no representation at the Nuremberg Trials) and, indeed, is still for the most part unreported or even suppressed. Also, there are difficulties with how to count Roma and Sinti deaths, since a large number were (quite legally!) killed, or castrated or sterilized long before the camps opened. But according to the majority of historians, the total deaths of that ethnic group (and, contrary to some “exclusivist” commentary, they were set for extermination as an overt “racial” policy) lie in the range of 500,000-1,500,000-—which would mean that upwards of 75 percent of those in German-held territories perished. Yet, no reparations of any meaningful kind have ever been issued to the survivors, and massive discrimination and persecution persists against those peoples even now (and seems to be growing, with the advent of the neo-Nazi movement).

That some writers, who should know better, suggest that The Roma and Sinti were put into camps for the same reasons, in the same proportions, and survived at the same rates, as “Asocials” (criminals, etc.) is ludicrous and shameful, not to mention historically insupportable. (Indeed, some accompany their analyses with ugly racial slurs, reminiscent of the official pre-war terms like Zigeunergeschmeiss--”Gypsy scum”.)

But even this parochial posturing obscures what is really important, and universal. The fact is that, however one defines “race” or other category of undesirables, the Holocaust cannot legitimately be thought of as “six million” dead. Rather, it is a larger story of more like twenty-six million murdered, including a large part of the civilian populations of Slavic countries. Even more universal: Genocide (and ethnic cleansing, and, more generally, hate-borne cruelty of all kinds that far exceed any needs of “competition for resources’) has been widely practiced, or at least accepted, by all ethnic (or cultural) majorities throughout history; though there is righteousness among some individuals, no group--no government, no religion, no race, no tribe—can legitimately claim such a virtue. I very much like the words of Israel Charny:

“I object very strongly to the efforts to name the genocide of any one people as the single, ultimate event, or as the most important event against which all other tragedies of genocidal mass-death are to be tested and found wanting. For me, the passion to exclude this or that mass killing from the universe of genocide, as well as the intense competition to establish the exclusive ‘superiority’ or unique form of any one genocide, ends up creating a fetishistic atmosphere in which the masses of bodies that are not to be qualified for the definition of genocide are dumped into a conceptual black hole, where they are forgotten.” [http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/wais/cgi-bin/index.php?p=364]

The other problem with treating the "exclusivist" way of thinking is that the holocaust is tied no only to a specific people, but also to a specific time. This obscures the fact that abominations are much more frequent that we should think: Ding-dong, the witch is dead, and we're all safe now, right…?

Ward Churchill thus concludes:

“In restoring the Gypsies and Slavic peoples to the Holocaust itself, where they've always belonged, we not only exhume them from the black hole into which they’ve been dumped in their millions by Jewish exclusivism and neo-Nazism alike, we establish ourselves both methodologically and psychologically to remember other things as well. Not only was the Armenian holocaust a ‘true’ genocide, the marked lack of response to it by the Western democracies was used by Adolf Hitler to reassure his cabinet that there would be no undue consequences if Germany were to perpetrate its own genocide(s). Not only were Stalin’s policies in the Ukrainians a genuine holocaust, the methods by which it was carried out were surely incorporated into Germany’s General Plan just a few years later. Not only was the Spanish policy of conscripting entire native populations into forced labor throughout the Caribbean as well as much of South and Central America holocaustal, it served as a prototype for Nazi policies in eastern Europe. Not only were U.S. ‘clearing’ operations directed against the indigenous peoples of North America genocidal in every sense, they unquestionably served as a conceptual/practical mooring to which the whole Hitlerian rendering of lebensraumpolitik was tied.

“In every instance, the particularities of these prior genocides - each of them unique unto themselves - serves to inform our understanding of the Holocaust. Reciprocally, the actualities of the Holocaust serve to illuminate the nature of these earlier holocausts. No less does the procedure apply to the manner in which we approach genocides occurring since 1945, those in Katanga, Biafra, Bangladesh, Indochina, Paraguay, Guatemala, Indonesia, Rwanda, Bosnia and on and on. Our task is - must be - to fit all the various pieces together in such a way as to obtain at last a comprehension of the whole. There is no other means available to us. We must truly ‘think of the unthinkable,’ seriously and without proprietary interest, if ever we are to put an end to the ‘human cancer’ which has spread increasingly throughout our collective organism over the past five centuries [I personally think this is giving history a shorter view than it needs!]. To this end, denial in any form is anathema.” [http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/feb97church.htm; see also A Little Matter of Genocide.]

The Century of Biology and the Future of Life

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 22:30:25 -0700

Physics, I have long thought, was the great science of the 20th century; biology would assume the mantle in the 21st. This supposition has lately been confirmed for me by two important participants. In October, 2006, I heard E. O Wilson; in December, it was Freeman Dyson. Biologist and physicist, their conclusions were nearly identical: Biology lies at the crossroads of every endeavor of life, from the chemical to the ethical. Further, our future, whatever it is to be, in enmeshed with, and dependent upon, every manner of biological imperative.

Both scientists, by the way, also make good cases for the tolerance, or even, in some cases (that is, for the sake of the planet’s future), outright espousal of the type of religion that Richard Dawkins finds so hideously offensive (see The God Delusion). For what it’s worth, my own feeling about Dawkins and his campaign is that he is attempting to use the same atomic weaponry as his apparent opponents, to eradicate (at worst) a minor cancer by obliterating all life—a mad neurosurgeon, using a chain saw to repair a brain that might not be all that sick. (At least Daniel Dennett, in Breaking the Spell, says he wants to examine the presumed ailment in detail first.)

Here are my notes after the Wilson talk:

It’s been an interesting week. I’ve become increasingly convinced that biology is emerging as the most important science of this century, if for no other reason than the fact that life, both as a concept and in implementation, is under a lot of stress--at least, insofar as humans are concerned. So, tonight, we heard E. O. Wilson talk about his new book (The Creation), wherein he attempts to enlist the assistance of, specifically, evangelical Christians. The thesis is that, “yes, I would like you to see things as a secular-humanist scientist, and, yes, I know you would love to re-convert me [Wilson was, by up-bringing, one of Them], but, hey, let’s forget about our tribal differences for now, to concentrate on what we have in common: the need to save the planet.”

This is a tall order, considering that the two “tribes” have been sworn enemies for years. But, if anyone can pull it off, to engage the political clout of 30 million evangelicals in America alone, it won’t be done through Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, but, rather, through “gentlemen” agents such as Wilson and Freeman Dyson. (Dyson’s book is a set of retrospective essays: The Scientist as Rebel.)

.Peter Singer wrote about “expanding the circle”. Will it stretch that much? Many of tonight’s audience were of university age—a time when you can afford to be realistic, and when you need to invest heavily in the earth’s future—though there was a smattering of geezer-class citizens, including myself. Well. Just the idea of tribal elders being held in such high esteem is, in this time of so much depressing news, encouraging to me….

Notes on Narration and the Narrative Imperative

Tue, 9 Jan 2007 22:11:37 -0800

E. L. Doctorow has a new collection of essays (Creationists: Selected Essays, 1993-2006). I was particularly taken with his introduction, in which he ponders the process of story-telling:

“Underlying everything—the evocative flashes, the dogged working of language—is the writer's belief in the story as a system of knowledge. This belief is akin to the scientist’s faith in the scientific method as a way to truth….Stories, whether written as novels or scripted as plays, are revelatory structures of facts. They connect the visible with the invisible, the present with the past. They propose life as something of moral consequence. They distribute the suffering so that it can be borne. To the skeptic who would not consider the story a reputable means of knowledge, the writer could point out that there was a time when there would have been nothing but stories, and no sharper distinction between what was fact and what was invented than between what was spoken and what was sung. Religion, science, simple urgent communication, and poetry were fused in the intense perception of a metaphor. Stories were the first repositories of human knowledge. They were as important to survival as a spear or a hoe. The storyteller practices the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies of modern intelligence.”

I hope to eventually develop the physical basis for narrative structure, as necessarily crystallizing in any species that exists within asymmetrical time (i.e., time with an arrow—i.e, history). From there I would propose considering scientific method as an ideal (reductionistically resolving matters to a single variable) and conclude that this ideal cannot be met except where time is, in fact, symmetrical—i.e., at the level of quantized time, where the problem is that the whole enterprise gets obliterated by uncertainty.

The short form of my musings is comes down to this: Both science and story-telling try to pose questions of and to nature in such a way as to expect reasonable answers. Much of “doing science” is about how the questions are framed, but…how is the line of questioning chosen in the first place? And what constitutes a “reasonable” answer?

Of course, regarding the latter point, science usually equates repeatability with reasonableness. Still, I suggest that some reasonable answers end up being much more reasonable than others, simply because they fit into an already (at least partially) understandable conceptual framework. This is, it seems to me, exactly how the questions themselves must be chosen. But, then, another word for “conceptual framework” is “narrative”.

My further musings arrive at the same conclusion by a more technical route, one about the methodology itself. The upshot is that, since nature does not, within history, ever resolve matters to a single variable comprehensible to humans (which is to say, nature is not a reductionist), the best science can hope for is to obtain answers on a scale understandable and reasonable to humans (and, here, I am not just talking about the audience of some scientist, but also to the scientist him- or herself!). But, again, this implies a narrative structure, yes?

The Freakonomy, the Internet, and the Institution

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 18:08:44 -0800

A few thought on reading Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and Freeman Dyson’s The Sun, The Genome, and The Internet:

Is the internet a good vector for making information egalitarian, a tool for everyone? I’m going to play devil’s advocate here and say that it may not, in the event, be a great enemy of informational asymmetry.
The abstract of my musings runs along these lines. In the first place, the internet has so friggin’ much information, much of it opinion or heavily scrubbed and slanted data vetted by…no one. How is the poor schmo supposed to sort it all out unless he is one of the “experts”? Can one legitimately consider himself a maven just because he, too, has, er, Views? (Anyway, the whole point of being a professional authority is not just to know stuff, but to be able to figure out which stuff actually means something valuable. Yes? If you need an expert, then, who you gonna call?)
Secondly, there is this dynamic: Unions, schools, charities, democratic republics and their ilk may start out as popularizing agents that “level the playing field” (this is not to discuss natural disasters, extinctions, and other apocalyptic doings that plough the metaphorical field down to bedrock). But, within some period of time—humans being humans, life being self-organizing life, and pecking orders being what they are—institutional existence come to take on a new flavor, to become a quasi-living, hierarchical entity, replete with internal organs and immune and reproductive systems, and standing armies. (Institutional hierarchies are, of course, almost by definition feudal and strongly asymmetrical informationally.) More simply, regardless of the playing field and regardless of the game, an informational pecking order will, eventually, shake out.
…Given, to be sure, a robust, well-fed, and diverse economy. Like rubber carnival castles that need a constant supply of hot air to maintain their structures, complex hierarchical institutions require a lot of energy. But that is, maybe, a different (and tricky, and, these days, very scary) topic. Maybe a good one for Freakonmists?

Oatmeal and Economies

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 17:41:00 -0700

I’ve long been fascinated with complex, self-organizing systems in the presence of an “energy” gradient. It now seems to me that the processes involved can best be thought of as “economies”, in that they are about how all the universe’s critters make their individual and collective livings. I suggest that this metaphor can stretch to cover all members of the above class of systems, be they biological, chemical, sociological, political, or even meteorological (hurricanes, too, organize systematically in the presence of harvestable energy to produce work). If this idea is even close to correct, then the tools of economics can profitably be brought to bear on a large variety of extremely interesting (and important) questions. (Just because argots differ does not mean that processes are not the same. Economists use the term “incentives” in much the same ways that philosophers discuss “intentionality”, but I suspect they are talking about approximately the same thing.)

Here is one set of questions, involving oatmeal, that keeps me awake nights. The complexity/emergence theorists often speculate about how systems self-organize, but, for the most part, they don’t say much about the energy gradient propping up the “economies” involved, and, even when they do, it is all about what happens when there is an abundance of exploitable energy (I think your typical economist look at matters equivalently). Fine, but that is only part of it—and it says nothing about how evolution could possibly score the power to pump (probably) adaptive characteristics such as tribalism, cooperation, and religion.

My question, then: What happens to complex organization when there is, as in crystalization and cooling oatmeal, not enough energy to go around, to provide new layers of complexity? Again, if the metaphor holds, such fallbacks (and die-offs) do happen, not only at the chemical level, but at the political/social scale as well. Sunlight, money (in all its forms), food, and oil all provide the energy needed to structure some institution or another, many of which are especially important to modern-day humans. And the sources of said energy do, sometimes, dry up or get ruinously expensive. What then? A rising tide may lift all boats, more or less, but when the tide goes out…?

Catastrophes do befall individual and collective lives; what difference does the slew rate make? That is, how does a rapid onset, one-shot catastrophe (like Katrina) differ in result from one coming on over one or more generations (like, surely, global warming)? And, since one critter’s poison is another’s meat (doomsday for some isn’t the end of the world for all), how do the various “life forms”, whether biological, social, or virtual interact in the teeth of various catastrophe scenarios?

The Quantum Black Knight, Gravitation, and the Theology of Big Science

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 14:16:50 -0700

My enjoyment of Lee Smolin’s writing led me (The Life of the Cosmos, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, and now The Trouble with Physics), eventually, to a couple of apparently notorious physics blogs (http://motls.blogspot.com/; http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/). These I have now spent much time perusing in horrified fascination. Here are a couple of layman’s impressions. (By the way, I use the term “layman” accurately, but, all things considered, rather proudly, and, um, not totally devoid of its religious connotations….)

After long, long observation, I have concluded that people are goofy, and now I know that physicists are too. But levels of humanity notwithstanding, I am left in shocked awe, that incredibly smart scientists can be, so…publicly, so…neither smart nor scientific. I am aware that, by some definition—and, perhaps, avocation—I am a “crackpot”, but then again, so, seemingly, is nearly everyone, so I'm in good company, there. Well. It is true that I cannot follow or understand many of the fine theological arguments, particularly regarding the mathematics presumably associated with how the world works at the reductionistic bottom of things. Yet, stridently proclaimed Gnosis of that microcosm seems, in some cases, to preclude useful knowledge of how the world works at higher, more corporate levels of understanding.

Skepticism and honest intellectual dissent are good, and should be encouraged, required, and even rewarded in science—as in any other human endeavor, save, perhaps, romance and barroom pugilism. I am not personally qualified to assess the technical correctness of string theory; I have not the ear to judge whether its ring is true or otherwise. Still, I am dismayed and annoyed that many of its practitioners and adherents seem to have given up on championing the theory, or, rather, meta-theory, on scientific grounds, and instead have forced it into a socio-religious framework, replete with cultish hero-worship, priestly elitism, arguments from dominance, fervor, wealth, and arrogance, and quasi-theological disputation along with multiple layers of esoteric rhetorical assumptions. (Just how many strings can vibrate on the head of a nine-dimensional pin, anyway?) I guess if you can’t beat the heretics on intellectual grounds, then carpe jugulum. But even the Catholic Church requires a devil’s advocate.

Distasteful, unworthy, and unnecessary it all is—and, perhaps, unfair: Like with a jousting match organized by the Black Knight’s patron, would-be contributors are kept out of the tournament, not because they cannot compete, but because they do not have the requisite pomp, the finery, and, especially, the retinue and courtly backing. And even if they do enter the fray, it might be rigged.

As I say, horrible. Goofy. Fascinating. There is surely some history being made here, but exactly what its eventual judgments will be is interesting to speculate about.

Pandemonium (All Demons) and Fitness Peaks and Piques

Fri, 19 May 2006 21:27:41 -0700

Here’s an example of how the mind has an internal pandemonious squabble generator, or, depending on how you wish to describe it, a competition among memes.

I was thinking about the career destruction of a colleague. Whether or not his technical capabilities were the strongest possible is beside the point. He had a very well-paid position for 20 years, and could have remained in it indefinitely. Yet he “chose”, finally, insubordination—he mouthed off to his boss. (To be sure, he does not remember things this way—thinking that the firing was out of the blue—but others do. And, of course, it is not always clear how to separate sass from cogent commentary, especially since his modus operandi had not really changed in 20 years.) Why did it come to this?

I suspect that part of him wanted to get the axe. The internal “discussion” must have been along these lines: “Look, we’re 55 years old, we’ve said all we can say here, and we’re not getting any younger. Sure, there’s a ‘living’ here, but is this all there is to life? Do we really want our legacy to have ‘peaked’ some time ago on, to be sure, a fairly low summit, so that we’ll just, now, slouch off into eternity? No! A thousand times no!”

“Okay,” says another voice, “we’ve had this discussion before. I’ve tried to get you to understand the security issue. We’re safe here, and well fed.”

“Yeah—safe, fat, and dumb. But for how long? What if our hill crumbles in a flood or seismic catastrophe or something. These things do happen, you know. Why should we suppose that we are immune?”

“We’ve been safe so far, so Somebody up there must like us. Why don’t you just shut up, schmuck?”

“‘Schmuck’, you say? I say, let’s try to win one more for the Gipper! Maybe we don’t have a specific peak to climb, but if we don’t get out and look for one, we’ll never get off the hill we’re on. We’ll never find another, you…you schlub!”

“Oh, please….”

“Well, then, forget the last argument, which, if you don’t understand the logic of by now, you’re a hopeless old geezer with head thrust mightily into the sand—and, worse, dragging me down with you. Try this: It’s now or never. If you think I’m going to the grave without checking out the next valley over, doing some major exploring, leaving my mark high up a new tree or two, well, you can just rot in your cell for all I care. You may have kept us in beans up so far, but now you’re a coot and a has-been. Not only that, but now, at last, I’ve got enough of the others on my side to out-vote you. Right, gang?”

A sound, generally of approval, though with a noticeable twang of dissent.

“Okay, okay. You won’t listen to me, so we’ll do it your way, for now. But, in fact, I still have some clout. Indeed, you still need me, in important ways. Let’s compromise.”

“Huh? How? You’re obviously just saving face.”

“Perhaps this is so.” And in a oratorical voice: “Listen to me, my friends. Our colleague sees the stars, but there are still tigers in the grass, waiting to take us down from the back, and snakes to sink fangs into heels. I will acquiesce. We will abandon warm hearth and cozy home. But an all-out and blind charge downhill is a race into oblivion. Let us take a few weapons with us. Specifically, this must look, to the outside world, like a forced retreat—a mission of challenge and courage—not a final picnic of autumn. In this fashion, perhaps we can talk the world into paying for this fool’s expedition. Do we have a deal?”

It is important, for evolution, to develop mechanisms to get kicked off peaks. The usual way of looking at things is that each organism, during its lifetime, achieves its local peak and stays there, come hell or high water. Its descendents, though, have to find their own peaks. Some of them, through “luck” and “skill”, find higher peaks. Yet, what is an organism? Humans, like other supposed monolithic “organisms”, are really more like collectives. This is an especially appropriate description of the mind, the parts and patterns of which act and evolve many orders of magnitude faster that the genome. In the cultural “fitness landscape”, it is important to find a multitude of peaks within a single person’s lifetime. At a young age, this happens daily, or even hourly. At an older age, security and collective welfare issues become dominant, and exploration slows (for most of us). Yet—and, I believe, this is the basis for midlife crises—that voice may only be muted and not dead. Even older, more ossified organisms can, in dire straights, scramble for new peaks. But the need to do so is a hard sell unless one gets evicted from snug quarters, or the mountain itself gets blasted away. Hence, the occasional need for sabotage: If the outside world doesn’t do the job, let’s loose the internal saboteurs. This, I believe, is what happened in my colleagues case.

Hot Water and Feudalism at the Edge of Dryness

Sun, 9 Apr 2006 20:30:07 -0700

Archimedes solved, it is said, engineering problems in his bathtub. At least he solved one specific problem, though I infer from the story that he did his best thinking while in over his head in hot water. For I too utilize steaminess in the service of mental prehensility. Being less well versed in the mathematical arts, I prefer running water, but the function is surely the same: In the shower I am a peerless poet, an inventor of all needful things, a playwright, a philosopher, an abundant lover of all those who require affection and understanding. I can win wars, or prevent them. There are no secrets of creation that can be kept from me: Better than the greatest physicist, I understand the structure and unfolding of the universe; more than the most learnéd theologian, I know its meaning.

Naturally, I thought of these things while under a calefacient spray; if my musings now seem incoherent and blathering, that is due to the corruption of exsiccation. I do have my day job, after all. Eventually, I towel off, and the brilliant and cogent resolvings that would have salved a troubled world evaporate, or sluice down the drain to diffuse and dilute into the turbid liquescence of the municipal sewers—the whole process alchemically transmuting, as it were, white water into gray matter, then white matter into gray water.

I very much fret and stew about unwatered humanity. Sometimes I think it would be best if conference rooms—especially those used by generals, diplomats, cabinet ministers, school principals, and other high officials—were built as institutional calderas. But this is a “dry” thought. In the first place, there is sure to be an aesthetic objection: Few of our colleagues, frankly, have the necessary, uh, charisma to gain inspirational stature in bathing situations. But the main rap on this line of musing is a more pragmatic one. The whole point of business convocations is to exploit the delicate (or indelicate) interplay of cooperation and competition essential to workplace primacy. That is to say, hierarchical, or differential dominance is crucial. While discussing a workgroup’s project under warm, wet conditions may indeed enhance cooperation, if all participants become equally smarter, the arms race of internecine rivalry merely gets jacked up to a new level. But if I, say, can jump a notch relative to you….

…Think what a statement that would make! The middle-management sycophants, parched and Saharan and in their expensive, constricting Armanis, forced to behold the physical and rhetorical éclat of the be-steamed Boss, the latter cutting through dusty clouds of sere, etiolated, and pithless thinking with a saberous spue of wit! (Post-shower, the now noetically flaccid executive can retire to the privacy of his or her office for a quiet, clean, and well-deserved break from trenchant cognitive afflati, leaving the plan’s actual implementation to the envious unwashed.)

And yet, the prospect of drought concerns the survivalist in me greatly. Should the draw on the aquifers of our nation require regulation such that profligate soakers become outlawed, only outlaws will have access to performance-enhancing spritzers, and the entire structure of society will become desiccated and, thus, endangered. Wetness will become the supreme black market currency—but one affordable only by the very rich—for intelligence is power, hot water the sodden gray eminence behind the throne.

…Outlaws, then, and the wealthiest liege lords. In the dynamics of fluxion, an affluence that reduces incrassately will devolve toward feudalism: the pleasures of the few riding on the labors of the many. Is this to be, then, the future of our society, of our world? No! Such a thing is not for me! They’ll have to pry my aspergillum from my cold, dry hands.

The Meaning of Life, Intentionality, Entropy, and the Thermodynamic Universe

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 21:51:40 -0800

As seemingly discrete organisms, we humans get a skewed perspective on how life works. For another way of looking at things, consider marine life. In the ocean, all critters swim in the other guys’ pee. Detritus is all-enveloping from an individual’s viewpoint. But one critter’s offal is another’s bread and butter. And there are many more, and closely packed levels of this in a watery environment than on land, so it must be impossible to ignore. It is “systems” all the way down. This blurs, massively, the distinction between “biological” and “non-biological”, between life and non-life.

At the bottom of it, all critters are generated of the same elements, of course. But way up the scale it is still hard to say where critter A leaves of and critter B (or non-critter A) begins. Life, as we present-day humans know it, can hardly exist without our gut bacteria; mitochondria; mates and family; automobiles; newspapers and other virtual “sense organisms”; metaphors, institutions…. When you really come down to it, defining an “organism” is pretty tricky.

It comes down to privileged viewpoints, of course. We think of life from our perspective, because it is precisely that perspective that is useful to our human level of life. However, even at the biological level, a complex life—and all life is “complex”—contains many complicit layers. In other words, it is a “food chain”, as are all “economies”.

[By the way, my use of “scare quotes” serves a semantic purpose: Terms thus indicated represent metaphors that have been “stretched”, perhaps without altering their “topologies”, but this is not guaranteed.]

But let’s get outside our parochial economics. Consider things from the atomic viewpoint. Now, from an individual atom’s perspective, the function of a human, say, would seem like magic: Why should all that VAST (here I am alluding to Dennett’s allusion to Borges’ Library of Babel) number of particles work in so improbably coordinated a fashion? (And, why, indeed, are certain nearby particles excluded from that action? What defines “borders”?) There must be a terrific amount of “intentionality” emerging from a complex interaction of all those particles. Intentionality is emergent, then? Okay, but the point of emergence is, I believe, that that the whole is greater than the arithmetic sum of its parts, but that it is equal to the complicity of its parts.

From a calculations viewpoint, of course, complicity is quite intractable, as it involves complex feedback in a temporally dynamic setting. As I have suggested elsewhere, this leads to one way to think of “free will”. From my notebook: This has to do with uncertainty. Nothing on a given level can possibly “know” the state—the position and the velocity—of every one of its “level-mates” within time. Thus, a full knowledge of a lower level will not allow a full prediction of the state of a higher level, as such a full knowledge would require the resolution of an unresolvable temporal term. Therefore, while all levels have some sort of intentionality, no level can resolve the intentionality of a higher level. For all practical purposes, then, what happens at a higher level of organization truly is magic. (Somewhat ironically—and definitely paradoxically—if any Laplace-ian demon [to predict to workings of a supposed clockwork universe] were in any sense possible, she would have to exist somewhere around the Planck level of time—that is, where, or when, time itself is quantized: If things could just stand still long enough to be catalogued before the next downbeat….The problem is, of course, that this is the very level where physical reality is unpredictable. So, in gaining a toehold in our knowledge of deterministic certainty, we have fallen into an abyss of uncertainty….

All this, of course, goes right over our atom’s “head”. The whole concept of the atomic point of view is, in a crucial way, bogus: The atom has no sensory apparatus to be “aware” of anything outside its parochial interests—bouncing off other like particles, exchanging electrons, dealing with quantum issues, whatever. Such things represent, importantly, the only atomic reality. True, sometimes “catastrophic” events, like fission, might occur. But when that happens is unpredictable, and why is entirely unknowable.

Likewise, whatever happens at the level of biological organisms is just, well, “natural”; that is simply “how things work”.

Is it possible, then, that there is higher-order intentionality than we, at the human level, are aware of? Sure. In fact, it is, from all that I can see, inevitable, with emergence working the way it does. Life (that is, “life” as we know it) has evolved to solve problems of continuance at our (parochial) scale. Stuart Kauffman (In Investigations) views matters thusly: “I suspect that the concept of an autonomous agent as an autocatalytic system carrying out one or more [thermodynamic] work cycles defines life.” Well, I’m ignoring, in this document, the concept of autocatalysis, but no single atom, or even sets of them multiplied by any number or exponents, will ever build a 40 floor skyscraper. The odds against this, within the lifetime of the universe, are VAST. Yet, some organization of atoms has emerged to make this possible (on a depressing scale, I would, on a personal note, add; just such a monster is presently being erected across the street, blocking hours’ worth of our sunlight)—to, in effect, find wormholes through possibility space that would be “inconceivable” to individual atoms.

The explanation of this phenomenon is not in the parts or in the study of any subset of them, but in the organization in context—or, more properly stated, in the system’s complicity. This complicity is a non-material thing, emerging out of the complex interaction of apparently material raw parts. Moreover, this complicity works downward: The non-material organization of one level has evolved to move material matter (i.e., to perform “one or more work cycles”) at a lower level. This technique represents a terrific fish-ladder leap up the downhill flow of entropy—that is, a large bit of apparent intentionality. My intentionality in writing this document, for instance, makes my fingers move across the keyboard in ways that would be essentially impossible from an atomic perspective. The odds against any collective of atoms moving in just that way are VAST. Yet it happens regularly. (And it is a good thing, too—at our level. We want the driver in the on-coming lane to perform amazing, atomically VASTLY improbable things to avoid us.)

So, in this slightly modified conception, LIFE is not about performing one or more work cycles, but in some way causing one or more work cycles to be performed. This allows a huge increase in what we call “life”. No longer are we bound to consider carbon-based molecular structures as the only candidates; rather, whatever complicit organization that has evolved to exploit some available resource to move upstream to entropy can be thought of as “living”.

Is there LIFE, then, at a meta-biological level of organization? Why not? We might not have evolved the sensory apparatus to detect this level of organization (why should we have?); yet, it would affect us, and influence our actions in ways we could never clearly see, let alone understand. A body politic, maybe? Or “The Economy”? I see no compelling reason to exclude these from The Great Chain of Life. They are emergent phenomena having (literally) evolved to exploit an available resource to make material stuff do things VASTLY improbable. (Further, they have evolved quasi-organs to perform specialized tasks, such as attending to propagational needs.)

Now, given emergent intentionality, the phrase, “all life wants to live” no longer seems banal, but, rather, quite useful for both explanation and prediction. Economies will not care beans, of course, about individual participants, any more than we would care about the fates of our individual cells. It is Darwinian-like success at their level of organization that is important.

Carbon-based life has figured out a suite of niches—ways to seek out new routes through possibility space, fueled by the exploitation of available resources. Other life can and—if it is life—must do the same. Possibility space is VAST, and, along the lines of “in my Father’s house there are many mansions”, multi-dimensional in ways no one form of life could exploit. (Kauffman points out that the space of all possibles expands VASTLY faster than it can be explored, though I wish to point out, hold the exegesis, that this expansion depends on available, “excess” energy.)

What constitutes an exploitable resource? Earlier, I wrote of “economics” as something emerging from, and complicitly enhancing, specifically human ways to make a living. Now, I want to muse on this metaphor in a more generalized setting. The Great Chain of Life? It’s all about food chains, then. At the human level, we mostly think of food—grain, nuts, game, and so on—as, along with materials to construct shelter, “primary” resources. Money, as a direct representation of “value” deriving from the exploitation of primary resources, is a secondary, or higher-order resource. But the “primary resources” mentioned above are hardly truly primary. As animals, we are compulsive consumers of protein first converted to that form by other life. We eat the goats that eat the grass that utilize the chloroplasts that exploit the solar energy and geothermal energy left over from the formation of the solar system which grew out of energy left over from the Big Bang. Where all the energy of the Big Bang came from is, so far as I can tell, unanswerable. So, for me at least, it must be literally primary.

Notice, though, that what happens to “energy” as in moves up from the Big Bang (or flows down, as life forms in the backwaters, to use Bill Calvin’s wonderful metaphor in The River that Flows Uphill) is that it breaks symmetry, and acquires organization: Energy plus “intentionality ” (of some form—gravity, for instance, though I feel it best to defer contemplation of what intentionality “really” is and where it all comes from) equals organized structure plus some temporal remainder. Plants do not ingest raw energy; rather they exploit an energy gradient to convert existing forms of organized complex structure—molecular carbon, oxygen, water, nitrogen—into others. Animals require yet more complex molecules for their own metabolisms (most notably, though not exclusively, proteins). The important thing to observe here is that it is the organization that is utilized. Atomic carbon, oxygen, etc., do not do the trick.

So: Higher level (emergent) intentionality feeds back upon lower level actions. Complicity works across levels of abstraction—levels or organization—not just within them. Moreover, from the viewpoint of higher level (emergent) organization, lower level organization is physical matter. (Are molecules “physical matter”? Not from the atomic standpoint: They are just atoms with some magical powers. Are plants and animals physical matter from the molecular point of view? No, they are just magically organized molecules. However, it is again important to note that “organization” need not be “apparent” in any real sense: Atoms and molecules are presumably devoid of the requisite sensory apparatus.)

In other words, emergent “non-material” organization somehow “causes” thermodynamic work to be done. This process, from a lower perspective, is magical, or at least unobservable.

Back to parochial economies. A money economy is an emergent “device”, with “money” being a representation of value, not the thing itself. Yet it—the representation—is, by itself, capable of, and has the “motivation” for, causing some amount of thermodynamic work to get done. (So, too, are all doctrines and –isms, all the “memeplexes”—and they all compete in their own Darwinian jungle.)

In this way, money can be a “pump”, of sorts: Its needs can bring about great changes in how real “value” is created and operates at a lower level of organization. For an obvious example, the need for monthly cash flow (to pay the mortgage, debt service, rent, etc.) influences where a family lives, the schools the children attend, the types and quantities of food consumed, and so on.

The metaphor of “economy”, then, can be parochial; it can apply equally well to the generalized process that brings a procedural system into harmony with its contextualized dynamic.

In any case, the point is, again, that emergent systems feed back upon the constituent “raw parts” in complex and complicit ways. And systematic thermodynamic work is performed through or because of this process; hence, one important definition of “life” is met.

Of course, it is often useful to establish further conditions in our definitions. For instance, it is common, when one is discussing the process of life, to include the concept (so to speak) of reproduction (not just replication; some bit of randomness or quasi-randomness gives natural selection something to work on, and thus is a necessary ingredient in any evolutionary system). That is, a living thing, in that tighter definition, has a lineage of some sort. And, usually, that lineage enhances, over time, the lineage’s ability to continue (and “improve”) itself, subject to all the complications of any Darwinian system: competitions, arms races, etc. Further, as in the Kauffman conceptualization, this is all “autocatalytic”—self-organizing. Although I won’t discuss this here, it is my contention that many processes we think of as having no physical referent—economies, politics, religions, and so on—are not monolithic blobs of quasi-protoplasm, but more properly thought of as autocatalytic systems, and therefore fit into the extended definition.

“Memes” are often mentioned in this context. They are the referents of a metaphor worth considering. On a physical level, memes are thought of as organized patterns of neural firings and inhibitions. But it is on the level of organization (which, by the way, is what, in theory, allows the transference of memes from one “host” mind to another), not the synaptic exchange of neurotransmitters, that the Darwinian processes operate. Memes are, therefore, emergent, and, from them, likewise, meta-memes and all manner of “isms”. (Check out Richard Dawkins’ original idea in The Selfish Gene, and how far the concept has been developed since, in The Electric Meme, by Robert Aunger.)

Life, then, exists on an indefinite number of organizational levels, each one dimly aware (if aware at all) of the vital operations of those above (or even much below) it. It is at the level of competition for resources that life recognizes life. Meta-memes have “lives” in the sense that I am suggesting; yet, to us humans, the competition is at our own, biological level. Sometimes we can invoke certain higher-order concepts, like “freedom”, “democracy”, “morality”, and “technology”—for, in fact, we humans have a syntactical, semantic language—an emergent sense organ—and just somewhat enhanced capabilities to understand higher-order levels of organization. Yet, to our chagrin, our grasp of these things is apparently not hard-wired, and, therefore slow and inaccurate.

Further Ruminations on Apparent Design

Fri, 22 Jul 2005 20:59:26 -0700

Our (meaning, we humans’) operating point seems to be at a phase transition, the fractal zone between strategies of problem solving.

It is true that there is a common misunderstanding of how the “design process”, in the engineering sense, actually works, But that misunderstanding is not that far out of line.

By way of comparison, evolution is essentially an “R strategist”, so far as design is concerned. That is, evolution evolved to throw out a lot—millions, billions, whatever it takes—of candidates, and pass on whatever works to the next drawing of the lottery. The Grim (and blind) Sower at work.

But the Great GS has a lot of time, and the energy of the universe, to spend. K strategists (in the biological sense) do not have that luxury. Out of the need to maximize the chances of individuals to survive, K strategists seem to have been selected for their abilities to “think things through”. This leads, in the case of humans, at least, to a quasi-“God’s eye view”—in essence, to weed out unlikely design possibilities before energy is expended in giving them an actual on-site audition. (When musicians audition for an opening, there in usually a pre-screening process, where applicants without credentials are required to submit recordings, thus saving everyone the trouble and expense of slotting in obviously unqualified candidates.) Consciousness is expensive, from metabolic and development points of view, but with the types of problems faced by, say, K strategist mammals, it is a small price to pay for “getting it right” (or at least pretty good) in a limited number of attempts.

To limn the metaphor, this is also true in an industrial sense: Product design is expensive, and, generally, the more technological the product, the more expensive it is. So, a design team will limit itself to considering, at each stage, a few likely candidates to compete against each other for further R&D funding. When the product reaches the market, probably a few competing design teams have likewise proffered their best designs; may the best product win—or, at least, may the most successful product become the most successful (within the constraints of the Panda Principle, et al.). But note that, while in the transformation from concept to implementation, high-level designs employ K strategy, a memetic process is involved to come up with the candidate designs in the first place. And memes can be R strategists: They are “cheap”; if one out a million survives, that is pretty good. (On the other hand, once memes become “implemented”, as in becoming a person’s “raison d’etre”—perhaps she spent much of her life developing some idea, writing her dissertation, getting a prestigious university position, becoming an editor of a major journal, and staking her professional reputation on a particular viewpoint—memes can become extremely expensive offspring, warranting huge parental investments. The collapse of fungibility flips R strategy to K strategy! )

Stuart Kauffman, among many others (myself not disincluded!) would love to discover “general laws” of how biology works (see Investigations and At Home in the Universe), and, indeed, how the universe as a whole works. He often invokes the Invisible Hand, after Adam Smith, referring to the eerie and wonderful congruence between (mathematical) models and the “real” universe.

But I find it interesting to ask what, exactly, is meant by “laws” in this context. What, after all, is a law, except something given, by executive fiat, from on high? Does the universe unfold as it does because of its own dynamics, discovered in the course of its (the universe’s) unfolding? Or does the universe unfold as it does because it is following an assigned trajectory—a rules based trajectory—through unfolding-universe space? Are laws a presciption or a history? How one answers, or even phrases these questions makes a big conceptual difference.

[And they probably themselves betray historical biases. That is, until fairly recently in human history, they were questions asked by philosophers of all stripes, whether deistic, theistic, or “natural”. Science and religion seem to be in that fractal region of in-process symmetry breaking, and have been since at least the Enlightenment.]

It seems that we just can’t get away from the appearance of design. It comes as part of the make-a-human kit, as it evolved, and is part and parcel of our worldviews, our languages, and our conceptualizations. Kauffman obviously senses this, and tries to put it in linguistic perspective, as he also regular invokes the image of the blind watchmaker—the ultimate R strategist. But, in a deep sense, this is another broken symmetry, the other side of the same coin, so to speak. The watchmaker may be blind, but, as a watchmaker, he knows what the product needs to be. And the watchmaker’s protégés must evolve vision, internal dynamics and the pressures of selection and homeostasis being what they are.

So, I return to the point I raised in an earlier rumination: The appearance of design is evolutionarily inevitable because design itself is evolutionarily inevitable. As E.O. Wilson points out (in Consilience), we humans may have evolved to believe in gods. In some sense, we must believe in gods if we believe in ourselves, because, in that same sense, that—deification—is precisely what we want for ourselves, what process have evolved to participate in! Indeed, the very fact that we muse on how the universe unfolds—and that we actively try to influence its unfolding—seems to show this quite plainly.

Does this mean we can influence the unfolding of the universe? Are our attempts themselves part of the natural dynamic of the unfolding universe? These questions seem to round back on themselves. That is, they are emergent phenomena: Unfolding begets a new unfolding trajectory. Watchmakers take on protégés. Gods beget gods. Of the father we are begotten, and the child begets the father. And round and round she goes; where she stops nobody—not even a far-seeing watchmaker—can possibly know.

The Appearance of Design

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 17:37:02 -0700

A common way of considering ‘design” in nature is that it is a myth: Natural selection can only address present needs; it cannot “see” into the future, so it cannot design anything. I understand these arguments. Blind processes carried out over the long haul of history, tracking changing environments all the while, may look like design, but, really, are not. And yet, it seems to me that if you make this argument, you must also say that humans do not design anything either—not really. It is either that or you say that humans are outside of evolution. Here I muse on the alternative.

In my way of looking at things, the appearance of design is evolutionarily inevitable, because design itself is inevitable. That is, any sufficiently sentient being will develop an “Appearance of Design” because it will, as a function of becoming sentient, develop design. For the purposes of the present ruminations, I will leap right over the processes of natural selection to get to what I want to talk about. I do feel confident that this chasm can be bridged, but…another time….

Any gradient can be utilized by some sort of “life” to ply its trade, to make a home in the universe. We generally think of a physical life along physical gradients (after all, that is where we make our “home”). But more generally, gradients can be of any type: virtual, mathematical, constructional, dynamical, dimensional, or as well, and the same kinds of emergent processes obtain, including complexification, arms races, natural selection, parasitism…. Differentials (of some kind) can be the engine for emergence, yet there seems to be an optimal “slope” for sustainable emergent behavior. A particularly area one just south of the edge of chaos. Chaos itself seems to be the abstractional equivalent of a physical black hole, and the gradient leading (mathematically) to it—the slope that flirts with chaos’ “event horizon”—provides a rich environment for all sorts of emergent forms. (This way of looking at things, by the way, suggests that it’s ecosystems all the way down.)

All life “wants” to live. Life itself is a gradient, powering life (given, to be sure, a more fundamental source of energy and resources at the more fundamental levels or organization). And it has what the philosophers can an intentional stance. It is, so to speak, an “agent” that in some sense “seeks” something.

All life processes that continue life are subject to and driven by selection pressures of some sort. Life processes lie along a number of interactional gradients. These provide complicit dimensional engines for selection.

Competition in this dynamical milieu always, if the “ecosystem” is rich enough, leads to an arms race. Increasingly complex processes are thus, in such cases, inevitable.

“Complexity” can (and eventually must) happen along several different abstractional continua. One continuum is speed, or organizational “velocity”. Cutting to the chase: Genetics is stable but slow. But, because of the Arms Race principle, problems will develop that require the evolution of far speedier solutions—solutions that can be found and utilized within the lifetime of a single organism, or even the “lifetime” of any sub-organism. (As it turns out, Lamarck wasn’t completely wrong, even if he was sniffing up the wrong Tree of Life!)

Memetic and metaphor systems are possible solutions to the problem of speed in a cultural context. One aspect of natural selection is that non-zero sum systems (win-win, particularly, but not exclusively) have at least a slight evolutionary advantage which will, over time, be parlayed into something really top down. I.e., non-zero sum solutions generate top down-ness: Cf. Prisoner’s Dilemma, where the best solutions are “from above”. A huge proportion of the problems faced by living entities is best dealt with through top down solutions.

Now, non-zero sum-ness lies along a continuum—a gradient. Because there is a “ecosystem” of non-zero solutions, there will be ferocious natural selection pressure toward top down-ness. Increasing sentience, and its attendant (and complicit) consciousness, become a perfect vehicle for the development of top down solutions. (Consciousness, relying on (in my view) a metaphor-based memetic system, cuts across abstractional levels like a wormhole through space.)

So, my conjecture is that all sufficiently sentient beings will evolve consciousness (even robotic ones!), and all sufficiently conscious beings (even robotic ones!) will come to believe in Design. (This is self-evident, as “design” means top-down solutions.) And a large proportion of these will come to believe in a Designer. A Designer, in this sense, is “obvious”: The conscious entity contemplating a Designer is herself a Designer. Why can’t it be Designers all the way up? Whether the “Designer” is supernatural, off worldly, or transcendental is another question, often following the more mundane dynamics of politics and economics. The Russian Tsars nominally believed in the Judeo-Christian Great Designer, a belief which presumably conferred Great Authority on their august personages; Lenin nominally believes in the Design-ship of the State (and “L’etat c’est moi”…).

Design (top down) solutions have evolved because they provide solutions for a wide variety of problems. But not for all problems. Thus, successful evolution is really a complicity among different classes of solutions along a number of continua, including speed and degree of non-zero sum-ness. (Conscious) top down-ness works complicitly across levels of abstraction. The dinosaurs may not have had a high degree of consciousness, but they did have plenty of genetic stability going for them, as their environment was itself quite stable. This was fine for a long time, but they were dead meat when really speedy solutions were called for, such as evolving extremely fast (humans can almost do this now, with gene customization and the like; whether we know enough to do this advantageously is another matter), or keeping comets out of the back yard.

In this way of looking at it, the gods are emergent virtual life forms, living along the top down gradient of consciousness. (So, yes, man does create God in his own image. He has to: What other model could there be…?)

So far as we know, grasses (for instance) are not religious. They have no pantheon, nor, presumably, any numinous sensitivities. Social insects have more, owing to, perhaps, the desired continuance of the hive. Wolves (whether a lupine caniform is wicked or not depends on your paradigm!) have a sort-of “god”, the alpha of the pack. (With domestic dogs, the human “master” assumes the alpha role.) But humans take the top down rules to an extreme level. It seems (to us, at least) that we’re the only species that can consider design in the way we do: as order imposed from the top, because we so often do it ourselves (admittedly, with mixed success). We have evolved to be the designing ape.

Top down-ism evolved because it is useful. Clearly, high level concepts can control low level events, but, importantly, top down-ism emerges from bottom-up processes—abstractional complicity. (Memeplex [Published as Heaven], by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, says, “It is the events, and their unfolding, that determine history. The meaning you attach to them is irrelevant.” But this is not so when interactive complicity is taken into account: As history is recursive, interpretation changes the unfolding history. Again, an advanced metaphor system cuts across levels of abstraction, so, with humans, top down and bottom up become complicit. We are the only species we know that (sometimes) claims an omnipresent, omniscient, and transcendental top down Designer deity. But a Spinozan bottom up deity is also big among many humans, including scientists, philosophers, and close-to-the-earth “contextualists”. Is “God” in the gaps, or in the continuum? Is there a Great Designer? Would we know, could we know if there were? What kind of deity could ponds have? Galaxies? Universes? What kind of deities could gods have?

Emergence, Complexity, Catastrophe, and Complicity

Mon, 30 May 2005 14:51:52 -0700

I’ve been thinking about “complicity” (the term comes from the writing of my friends Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen (see Figments of Reality and Collapse of Chaos); it refers to the idea that subsystems in complex organizations are thoroughly interactive), and how to put the concept on a somewhat more formal basis.

One way to view the unfolding of the universe is as a clockwork cosmos: Starting with the most fundamental LaPlacean elements—that is, from a “God’s-eye view”—the entire future of the universe, and every trajectory to arrive there, is laid out perfectly for observation. The trick, of course, is to be able to reduce things to those elements.

In this view, emergent phenomena are merely different magnifications of the abstractional telescope. Yet, to root out the needed fundamental elements, how far is “down”? Who knows? A first argument, then, against the reductionist approach is to point out its practical futility.

But I’m thinking there may be something else going on: Even given complete LaPlacean understanding at any given level (i.e., at whatever level of description we choose to define as “fundamental”), it is not possible, even in principle, to derive a complete understanding of a higher level. Indeed, if I am correct, it is, in any description that involves a temporal component, not possible to have a complete understanding of even a lower level of description. Further, this is not merely a function of the limits of parsing resolution, but is integral to how the universe goes about its business. That is, not only does it unfold from the bottom up, but also from the top down. In other words, feedback—both positive and negative—occurs not just among elements on a single level of abstraction (a difficult enough sorting-out challenge), but, crucially, across levels.

[It is important to note that feedback mechanisms involve randomness, or quasi-randomness, of two kinds. One is in the addition of noise in the signal that is fed back. The other is in timing jitter, so that the return delay is to some extent unpredictable. To schematicize this, think of noise generators both in series with the signal, and parallel to the delay generator within the feedback generator. Indeed, one can imagine many complications of this sort. These complications, in addition to the tuning of the loop’s resonance, can be viewed as a mechanism for amplifying randomness: If quasi-randomness is insufficient, then you can tune your system by amplifying real (quantum) randomness to any degree you wish.]

This is, of course, implicit in the gestalt idea that the sum is greater than the parts. But I propose to update this by striving for a formalization of the behavior of emergent systems. Consider, for instance, that the logic of an anthill cannot be derived easily (and maybe not at all) from a knowledge of the logic of all the component ants. The collective logic, from which is generated the next higher level of abstraction, is greater than that of the sum of the participants. (In a sense, each ant is a kind of stupid homunculus; as Dan Dennett points out, a hierarchy of decreasingly intelligent homunculi is no violation of infinite regress.) The logic of the colony operates on its own level, and “cares” nothing, or very little, about the fate of any one ant. Yet the logic of the collective profoundly influences the behavior of individual participants. A danger to the whole beats the war drums for the parts.

Put this way, we see complicitous feedback nearly everywhere we look. Cf, for instance, a line I often use: For all the yowling and screeching, there is no shortage of kittens. The logic of genetics and reproduction in on a different level from, and cares not more that a whit or two about, the logic of a pain-free existence for Tom and Thomasina, but deeply influences their conduct.

Genes, memes, and demes all are logic systems that are partly independent and partly interdependent upon each other. [That is, they have some finite impedance in their presentation.] On the level of human emotion, cheating partners can cause true pain, yet this logic is (often) subordinate to the logic of selfish genes. But memes (often) fight back, calling the shots at the organism level. What calls the shots at the social level?

At the scale of human consciousness (consciousness apparently being an emergent phenomenon), we cannot be overly concerned about the plight of any individual cell. When an influenza virus invades, we throw numbers at the problem—that and the Darwinian logic of the immune system. These cells do their patriotic duty, presumably knowing nothing about the collective logic (or, at least, no more than the average soldier about the reasons for being at war…). Still, they die hideous deaths in massive numbers for it. And we, the collective, are relieved, if not precisely “grateful”.

Many scientists, including Steve Pinker, deny the importance—even the existence—of “superorganisms.” (See The Blank Slate.) Thus, emergent systems are, to them, a non-productive way to think about (human) behavior. But I believe that understanding emergence is the key to understanding behavior, because it is a metaphor for what happens whenever there is an abstractional gradient in the phase changes just south of chaos—whenever, that is, there is exploitable fuel to power life.

Given a Darwinian imperative and domesticatable fuel, logic systems—life—become not only possible, but mandatory.

Logic systems? Think of that which follows a dynamic “logically”, like drying mud or cooking oatmeal arranging itself into hexagons. “Life” is merely a complex logic system—complex in that it operates on multiple layers of abstraction, and so gets replication, or reproduction, into the bargain.

With sufficient fuel—exploitable, well-behaved “energy” gradients—logic systems will emerge out of, well, out of pretty much anything: a primordial soup, genetics, memetics, music, the playing fields of Eton, the killing fields of Cambodia, politics, the economy, even hagiography, for goodness’ sake. And, given the Darwinian imperative and sufficient fuel, logic systems can, and will emerge from collections of logic systems. (And it is logic systems all the way up, or at least a long way up; the higher one goes, the longer the supply lines, so, eventually, logic systems emergent from logic systems emergent from logic systems run out of exploitable fuel.)

“Given the Darwinian Imperative”? Perhaps natural selection is the fundamental logic system, from which all logic systems evolve (and will evolve, if numbers can be thrown at the situation, if there is a mechanism for “chance” variation, and if there is sufficient fuel and time enough). Literally, universal Darwinism?

Then, we come to the realization that fuel—exploitable resources, both as energy and as catalysts—are always a specific life’s limiting factor: Any logic system that has depleted its needed resources is a goner, and can take down a web of interdependent logic systems with it. Life needs fuel: A colony of bacteria in a petri dish will grow until it runs out of food. Then it dies, unless it can, somehow, migrate—to the refrigerator, say—or otherwise find a new (and larger) supply of food which the bacteria evolved to exploit. The alternative, a much slower one, is to evolve into something that can exploit a different, and (at least temporarily) more plentiful resource.

At this point, I’d like to take a large abstractional leap, to consider a kind of super-organism: the economy that allows 6 billion and more humans to inhabit the petri dish known as earth. As with all complex “econo-spheres”, resource density is not uniform. Indeed, whether one is a pauper, a prince, a body-politic, or (maybe) a black hole, the whole logical point is to have more exploitable resources than the next guy—a gradient that itself becomes a resource to fuel other super-organisms, like a social order. Thus, in the logic of personal continuance, a place at the trough is the crucial first requirement, and, when push comes to shove, niceties like human ethics and morality become a luxury—in the trenches, a quite expendable one.

Logic systems built from logic systems built from logic systems…may get “smarter” all the way up, but they have increasingly long “supply lines”, and are thus like a house of cards: strong enough with no stress, but what happens when the glue fails? (As Hannibal discovered, elephant feed is harder to come by in Switzerland than in Carthage.) Or, try another metaphor: the carnival rubber “castle” that maintains its structure by the constant influx of hot air. And…when the compressor is turned off? Still another metaphor: Life is, when resources are abundant, like a game of musical chairs, where more and more chairs are put out, allowing an increasing number of players. So…what happens when the chairs start getting taken away? And, not just one at a time, but in whole bunches…? And this is the only game in town? And it isn’t really a game and the losers really do lose, forever?

I am talking about oil, of course. Sure, I also mean uranium and fish in the sea and water in the aquifer and trees in the forest (especially those of the tropical rain forest; temperate forests can, if we let them, grow back in a few human lifetimes) and all the other resources non replete-able within individual lifetimes. But, for the present discussion, I mostly mean petroleum and other fossil fuels, which collectively are the major source of “hot air” to keep the economic rubber castle of six billion and more humans from collapsing. (“The economy”, far from monolithic, is really an emergence, a collective of little economies—and it is economies all the way down.) But the world’s supply of this lifeblood is replete-able only over the span of hundreds of millions of years, while its present rate of consumption will suck the dish pretty much dry within a couple hundred (from when the marvelous gushing teat was first sucked; many, including some with excellent credentials, feel that the great weaning has already begun…)

The world’s economies have evolved to be highly tuned, “professional” exploiters of this particular fuel. When we run out of oil (more correctly, when we run out of cheap oil), and we will, who will win? Who will lose? Who will have a chair when the music stops for good? And will the losers be good sports?

A world without oil will, at the very least (that is, if a viable replacement is in place…quickly, and if we don’t trash our version of the world through other means), demand a terrific restructuring of economic logic, and, with it, individual fortunes. Likely, a world without oil will not support six and more billions with any recognizable level of affluence—and possibly not at all. The “natural selection” pressures for new economies will, without a doubt, be ferocious, especially as they must inevitably turn more local and isolated. As with all Darwinian processes, not all will win; most will lose.

All this talk about the end of oil is important, but, to return to the question of how complicity might work, I have a more academic—if, ultimately, no less eschatological—matter I now wish to muse upon. (I am a human, of course, and I have concerns and fears on a human scale, which is why the End of Oil is an important topic: We are, for all practical purposes, really discussing the End of Time—at least for many of us and our lineages. But…well, there is, I think, the unmissable metaphorical point about riding a few wild metaphors through many levels of punditry-space.)

The question is about catastrophe tracking, as opposed to Fisherian tracking, in evolution.

We begin by observing that a lineage is best served—i.e., it can continue to be a lineage—if its competencies track environmental change.

Now, in order to keep the discussion moving, let’s not get carried away; nevertheless, ruminating about what, exactly, “the environment” consists of is worth a few moments of our time. For genes, the most obvious—and, more to the point, immediate—environment is a genetic one. After all, it is the mutational variability among the genes in a common pool that gives natural selection the raw material to work with. But there is a lot of context “out there”: The flux of meteorological, seismic, atmospheric, astronomic…not to mention social, cultural, and memetic conditions—in short, events across all levels of abstraction—define the milieu in which lineages play their Darwinian roles. Furthermore, no gene is an island unto itself, but, I’m thinking, recruits others and joins coalitions to actively alter, or attempt to alter, at least the own local context, to skew it away from both idleness and chaos. All the while, the competition is doing pretty much the same thing, of course, so the dance is extremely complicated, and not entirely amenable to a reductionist exegesis, except, possibly, on a statistical basis. (But how reductionist it that?)

Back to my main argument. Fisher (as Richard Dawkins relates in The Blind Watchmaker) proposed a microscope focusing mechanism as an analog of environmental tracking. Following this train of thought, large jumps—maybe because the microscope operator has twitchy fingers—will not track the small changes assumed to occur to the plate relative to the system’s optics. Small shifts, however, usually do a fine job. The analogy works well, then, in an environment that is comparatively static (that is, it changes more slowly than the tracking system). Even though there will always be some tracking latency, it will be minimal. However, it is worth noting, for purposes of extending the image, that contexts flux on many temporal (and spatial) scales, and the speed and magnitude of any particular event are unpredictable—except, crucially, on a statistical basis.

Does evolution evolve? Natural selection may be blind, but in the competition among selection mechanisms, will one win where others lose? Given enough time evolution will hit upon a Good Idea (if it works!), and it is clear that a suite of skills to track, with minimal latency, contextual flux over wide magnitudes and slew rates (to borrow a term from electronics engineering) is a very fine idea indeed: The better an organism can thus track, the better off its lineage will be. To be sure, there is always that pesky issue of economic trade-off. Developing and maintaining a sophisticated mechanism for tracking types of changes that happen once in a blue moon may not be worth the cost. Also, it should be noted that hardwiring statistical predictions into a genome, though not impossible, nevertheless requires a lot of data. These data will not exist for very rare events, although what is considered “rare” depends on the life-span organism doing the “analysis”.

[Jumping back to the matter of oil, the fact is that the “sudden” and catastrophic reduction of such a fundamental source of energy is extremely rare, and most desperately experienced only by those who did not pass on their reflections on the situation to their descendents, because there weren’t any. Still, there are a few models to consider and scare the pants off anyone who thinks too much about it all: The K-T catastrophe that was the bete noir of the large reptiles, for instance, along with whatever brought about the Permian and other earlier mass extinctions. If these are too distant, consider the more modern examples of the fall of Easter Island civilization , the end of the Mayans, the reindeer of St. Matthew Island (all wonderfully described by Jared Diamond in Collapse), and, of course, bacteria in a petri dish. But, while we are still clothed, back to the story:]

So slew rates and magnitudes can be plotted against time, as can economic conditions. The optimal trade-offs are, then, what competing lineages are also calculation and betting the farm on. But all gamblers really want to win, and extinctions do happen, so arms races are inevitable, and hedging of bets, poker faces, cheating, and all manner of complex advanced techniques will, eventually, develop.

I was musing about this a few years back when one of the kids brought home a video of Rambo. Interesting juxtaposition, that. Under most circumstances, it would seem, sociopaths and psychopaths are not “adaptive”, which is to say that a modern society would be best served by eliminating all sociopathology and psychopathology from the gene (or meme) pool…yes? The problem is that a “modern” society can turn into a Lord of the Flies scenario (or worse) very quickly. Noah had some notice of the impending flood, and migrational vanguards (e.g., the early nomadic settlers, or, in fact, the early European settlers, of the New World) can more or less predict the unpredictability of the new environment. (This is, of course, one super-genetic reason that both biological and cultural evolution take place faster at the frontier, in the small side channels of life rather than in the mainstream.) But Douglas Adams’ Arthur Dent (nearly the late Arthur Dent) had essentially no warning that his world was going to change drastically—actually, to go out of business—pretty much before his very eyes.

So, in an idealized world, we would no longer have any Rambos grunting and slashing among us…? Uh, what will Earth do when the Rigelians show up, hell-bent on finding a new source of protein, or a new planet to rule since they trashed the home world? As it turns out, of course, we have never figured out how to make a perfectly civilized society, and that may be a good thing. A metaphor stretched past its topological aptness is a dangerous thing, often tempting us to skin the bark off the wrong tree, but maybe we can, at least for now, get away with suggesting that societies can profitably hedge their bets by keeping a few misfits in their talent pools.

To recap, what is needed—what would be a Good Idea—is a mechanism to track contextual flux slowly most of the time, but to keep several layers of automatic back-up devices ready to kick in when normal tracking is too slow and too feeble to do the lineage much good. Does this happen?

Let’s say that it is likely that most genetic changes in a lineage are not adaptive, but, rather, they are neutral or otherwise non-participatory so far as natural selection is concerned. Now, perhaps we can make a small amendment to this proposition: “…they are neutral so far as natural selection is concerned most of the time.” Mutations come in many sizes, from micro to macro (I mean, of course, that individual mutations will, depending on the specific site altered, bring about all different sizes of phenotypical changes, which is what linked traits and regulatory genes are all about), and most must be non-adaptive—especially, like with Fisher’s microscope, the larger ones. Non-adaptive mutations, by definition, do not “direct” a lineage in any particular direction, so, under normal circumstances, are never noticed. In fact, these are vastly out-competed if not outnumbered by those mutations that are adaptive. But how about under extreme stress, when normally tracking micro-mutations are all goners? Then otherwise non-adaptive macro-mutations might suddenly become adaptive (since they would be optimized for conditions somewhat-to-quite distant from those of normal tracking) and now stand a chance, small, perhaps, but the best one for a tenable future, yes?

[To briefly chase down a rabbit hole, I’m thinking that the evolution of neural solutions (which, in turn, eventually lead to memetic mechanisms and consciousness) may have come about in this fashion, propelled, of course, by a fairly specific solution (like Bill Calvin’s rock throwing; see The Throwing Madonna) to a general need. This discussion could get quickly out of hand, to become a whole warren, as it would involve the concept of metaphor (particularly, but not only, memetically represented metaphor) as a way to warp-drive across abstractional possibility space, a favorite topic of mine. For now, then, I will limit my commentary to observing that consciousness is a fairly low-cost way to track many high-speed aspects of contextual flux.]

This weak form of catastrophe tracking becomes, then, a testable hypothesis. We need only the empirical observations that 1) most mutations are non-adaptive, and 2) mutations come in many “sizes”.

What about a slightly stronger form, employing a “telenomic” mechanism (to use Mayr’s term)? That is, perhaps it would be interesting to speculate about an “exaptational drive”, wherein organisms in a lineage have “learned” to hedge bets by generating not single purpose solutions, but somewhat generalized ones that, in extremis, can be converted to other functions? [Remember linked traits? Perhaps some mutations can unlink them…?] In other words, where the convertibility is built in, as it were? This, too, seems possible, and rather likely. (Indeed, I hope very much that this is the case, at least where humans are concerned: These frail bodies and lame brains were “invented” over the long haul of evolution, most of which happened a long time ago. But, over the next few years [!] they will have to deal with some very sophisticated and thorny problems. If those bodies are as hard to alter as they seem to be, I’m hoping our minds can work with the flexibility necessary to see our lineages through. [To be sure, however, mere hope may not cut it: Unlike the Judeo-Christian Divinity, Nature guarantees us no special privileges.])

How could this come about? I believe this idea is implicit in Richard Dawkins’ “evolution of evolvability” concept. In the long run, probability analysis based on historical statistics must tend to get hardwired into the genome (‘corrections’, needed to account for “quickly breaking news” can be dealt with socially, culturally, or memetically). And one of the statistical predictions is that “change” is unpredictable but inevitable (particularly so in small, isolated gene pools that are candidates for becoming new species), so, rather than fight it, go with it. This is a limited form of predicting the future based on past history. Moreover, it is, I believe, why the blind watchmaker analogy eventually bites the dust: While the watchmaker, or Watchmaker, may indeed be truly blind, the protegenic apprentices will, some fine eon, hit upon both figurative and literal vision as a Good Idea. Humans, of course, carry the vision thing to an extreme, as I’ve discussed elsewhere, even purposely attempting to design their own futures….

We know that many genes are expressed differently in different contexts (which is, of course, why the “recipe” metaphor works well while the “blueprint” one does not), and not only different genetic contexts, but those including the Outside World as well. In a known, slowly changing milieu, different genetic expression is largely predictable, but, under stress, all bets are off. Moreover, different expressions often lead to phenotypical and behavioral differences, which in turn lead to greater variation in sexual selection, which feeds back to influence the variability natural selection has to work at the genetic level. Thus, via positive feedback, environmental stress could engender significant (macro-) genotypical changes with extreme rapidity—in just a few generations in some cases. All this would occur with lowered resolution and redundancy within a lineage, to be sure, but with its continuance at stake, who cares?

In any case, my hunch is that the robustness of a species in coming to terms with contextual flux (i.e., its resistance to extinction) has a great deal to do with its exaptational skills—its flexibility, or its ability to generalize in some fashion. At the molecular level, I surmise that some parts of the genome, or even, perhaps, some “junk DNA” could be cannibalized for raw parts in an emergency. (In principle, this is testable, I’m pretty sure.) At the neural level, this would seem to indicate that some part of the slate must be blank, or at least re-writable (sort of like an E-PROM). And, at a cultural level, we can muse about all sorts of Donald Brown’s “universals”—such as music—that don’t seem to have an obvious reason to exist so far as standard evolution theory is concerned. That is, while our primary memetic logic is built around language (in cats, visual images, maybe; in dogs, olfactory ones), a logic or meta-logic built around music, say, is entirely possible, and surely happens in many cases, especially in dire straights. This is true regardless of the “origin” of the “universal” in question. Calvin cites sequencing as the most important precursor to music. I’m inclined to go along with him, although I believe that there are other precursors (it is the collective of these precursors that is important); one can’t, for example, build polyphony and counterpoint out of sequencing talents alone, but there it is. Withal, the point is that life, on any level of abstraction, has to be opportunistic, to ride the dynamic wave that washes it, to build a furnace to burn the fuel it is presented with. And this fuel can be a musical logic system. It can also be any philosophic logic system, including science….

While I’m thinking about it: Some commentators have theorized that “consciousness”, at least as it is conceived from introspection, is impossible without language. Now, I am not qualified to discuss this from a neurological standpoint, but I can say, with a fair amount of confidence, that a representational “mind” is such an astoundingly Good Idea, in spite of the obvious propagation delay, that evolution must have hit upon it very early—long before humans, with their vaunted sequencing skills upon which language is largely built. Again, when I talk about a “representational mind”, I mean a metaphor machine. True, linguistic metaphors are largely temporal (sequential) orderings (often) temporal “micro-phors”. But this linguistic usage of a deeper metaphor system may have essentially hitched an evolutionary ride: Non-linguistic animals—the rest of the lot—surely engage reality at a representational level as well, just without the fancy sequencing hardware. And we humans, too, engage the first order modalities as the front end for representation, which must be, at the bottom of it, comparison with what is stored in memory. In this way of looking at metaphor, language (a higher-order modality) is important, to be sure, but mostly for, as I say, the primary engine to “warp-drive” across possibility space. Pre-language “engines” run at “impulse speed” only. The other thing to say about this is that humans often engage other higher-order modalities, like spatial mapping, to generate metaphor. And this, too, may have hitched a ride: Higher order representations require a lot signal processing horsepower to generate enough speed to be truly useful, and so have surely been less used in the days before big brains.

[To fully explicate these ideas at the human level requires an aside into the philosophical concept of object vs. subject, or the I/me dichotomy. I’m sorry to leave the connection cryptic here, for the topic deserves better. But in brief we can trace the evolution of what I am calling the “metaphor system” from “object proxies” (Antonio Damasio’s term; see The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness) to an open-ended, multi-dimensional abstractor/generator. At this level of discussion, we are thereby provided one type of positive feedback explanation for the evolution of a large, cognitively generalized brain. But where the idea really takes off is the next level of discussion, for there we consider “metaphor” as not only a way of mapping, via proxies, the unfolding of the universe, but as an active (!) participant in the unfolding.]

There is another form of catastrophe tracking that is so obvious that it is easy to miss: sex. Dither, to use another of my favorite metaphors, makes any digital system more robust. Genetics is digital; shuffling genes from one generation to the next is a serious hedge against specialist, “professional” genes that are extremely successful in a relatively fixed environment, but stand no chance if the game suddenly changes. This, in fact, is closely related to the Rambo thing: Professionals—specialists—will out-compete amateurs in a slowly changing milieu; the fortunes are reversed when things speed up and approach chaos.

The strongest form of catastrophe tracking—a putative set of genes that somehow become “aware” that something has gone terribly wrong with the world out there and, in essence, pushes the panic button to allow macro-mutations that would have otherwise been suppressed—is, admittedly, the most speculative as well. Still, there are, I feel, good reason to explore the possibilities, at least to generate blue-sky hypotheses. The main problem has been the lack of a theory how higher order events can influence lower order ones—how top-down explanations can work in an otherwise bottom-up universe. In fact, much progress toward such an understanding has been made in the last few decades. I won’t bother here to develop the full thesis, though I will outline some of the topics needed for its exposition:

Emergence theory
Hierarchies
Nested
Non-nested
Feedback
Static
Dynamic
Negative
Positive
Constraints

Levels of Abstraction
Metaphor system: micro- to meta-proxies
Features and object proxies
Pattern proxies
Structure proxies
Fungibility
The “collapse of fungibility”
Reification
Resonance

In short, the idea is that the universe unfolds not only in a bottom-up sense, but a very real top-down one as well (one does not need to posit a participatory Creator to make this work), and that there are lines of communication between these them. That life is an emergent phenomenon is no longer especially controversial, of course; what is less agreed is that higher levels of emergence influence (direct? design?) lower levels. I’m pretty sure I believe this latter thing to be true, though I will not here try to convince anyone else to concur. I’ll only mention a few trivial examples. 1) The health of the anthill affects the roles taken on by individual ants; 2) thoughts alter the states of individual neurons; 3) the economy influences the plights of individual citizens.

Of course, one can argue that this is merely looking through the other end of the abstractional telescope. But, to recapitulate, I counter-argue that it is not possible, even in principle, to understand the workings of a higher level from even a complete understanding of a lower one (the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts). Thus, the workings of that lower level system cannot, out of an open-ended context, be completely known either!

Keeping all this in mind, we can conclude, I believe, that it is the human condition, not science fiction, to want to know the future, to plan for it, and to attempt to change it, even when that change involves tinkering with genes and their associated molecules. (Humanity is the Designing Ape, the God-playing Ape.) Furthermore: “human condition”, surely, but on a far more limited basis, that of every living thing. As alluded to earlier, Dennett has somewhat rehabilitated the “homunculus” concept by pointing out that a sort of virtual, emergent homunculus, made up of increasingly more stupid agents “all the way down” violates no important principle. This is, of course, the flip side of Darwin’s “appearance of design” idea. Natural selection and mutation are about as “stupid” as you can get. Yet, out of those Darwinian raw parts, highly complex, even intelligent results can be had. Out of blindness comes vision, and from vision, an “improved” genotype, perhaps, may ensue. This is how “nature does it”, we know, for the simple reason that we, too, come from those same natural, stupid, Darwinian raw parts!

At the same time…

We think we are smarter that the bacteria…? I’m not totally convinced….

Another hypothesized example is less trivial, and fairly close to home. It can be inferred from a reading of standard evolutionary theory, and is testable. It also fits into Stu Kauffman’s conceptual framework regarding extinctions (see Investigations): Perhaps a killer comet did do in the dinosaurs, but, if it hadn’t, endogenous processes would have eventually accomplished the same thing. (As the Kingston Trio pointed out, years ago, “What nature doesn’t do to us will be done by our fellow man.”) Here is what I am thinking: If an organism senses impending doom, the tendency is to throw numbers at the problem. In other words, K-type reproductive strategies work best in relatively stable environments, which large mammals specifically evolved to exploit—to attempt to bring about (and in the case of humans, to attempt to assure!). For most other critters—insects, bacteria, and so on, existence is always a dicey issue, so R-type strategy is always appropriate. However, “K” and “R” strategies are not discreet, but on a continuum. “Stability” varies, so, if there is a mechanism to estimate relative stability, it most likely evolved to help reproductive strategies track it. (The main way to increase the tracking speed of natural selection is to increase the selection pressure. This happens naturally when higher numbers compete of more difficult to obtain resources.)

What could such a stability sensor look like? Many things. There are limitless numbers of potential calamities ready to befall an organism. Thus, a sensor, like Granddad’s bunion that could predict a thunderstorm could be useful. So could a nose that knew a noxious product when it smelled one. Indeed, any sense organ—primary or, like language, a virtual (higher order) one—can, and will be, pressed into service. Is there any evidence that such a feedback loop exists, and operates among humans? I mean, past the obvious sensory ones? Possibly. It is apparently documented that families are smaller in urban (from a health-care standpoint, stable) milieu than in a rural (dicey) one. Also, low-income (from a social-success standpoint, unstable) families seem to have larger families than the (relatively stable) working middle class. Teen pregnancy is far more common among the poor (life’s potential losers) than among the rich (the obvious winners).

None of this is proves my conjecture, of course, but we may now guess where to look for a smoking gun. And, if this is at all close to how things actually work, it bodes ill for trying to take the pressure of a population that will suddenly be far higher than the environment can support simply by appealing to “reason”.

“Life on Earth” is not endangered, to be sure. The presence of some 150 varieties of bacteria in the Hanford radioactive waste tanks attests to that. And, just perhaps, even human life has a future, although that may be small comfort to those “losers” who face personal extinction. I mean their lineages, of course; we all face personal extinction. Indeed, one way to view death is as an act of creation, as Heinz Pagels pointed out with wrenching eloquence (see The Dreams of Reason). Neotony may be one way life (in general) tunes itself: Youthful plasticity keeps the “bits” from stagnating, while death keeps the living from slipping over the edge of chaos.

[Dancing on the scarp with Death? What, a pavane? Maybe a tango? But that is another discussion, or maybe the same one….]

A Sunset Sonnet

Thu, 13 May 2004 17:30:58 -0700

Metaphors—The Dark Side

Thu, 20 Nov 2003 18:30:58 -0800

[A few additional words about metaphors and their metaphorical Dark Side, not forgetting my propensity for over-the-topness.…,]

It seems fairly clear that generalized feature detectors and processors (what I’m calling, in a linguistic context, the metaphor system) evolved because they are useful in a survival sense. (Whether “survival” is taken literally or as metaphor is part of the extended story, but let’s ignore that for now.) In other words, they are tools. And, like all tools, they can be used well or used badly—and, if it comes to ethics, for good or for bad.

The strength of metaphors comes from their appropriate resonances with physical “reality”. (I’m using the term “resonance”, as opposed to “congruence”, because that seems more, well, congruent to how our feature abstractors and processors actually work. That is to say, in my terminology, the appropriate metaphor and physical reality have the same topology.) Their weakness comes from their sometimes inappropriate resonances. “Brain puns” is one coinage for this. (In a way, I don’t care for this image. “Puns” are meant to be gotten—what’s the point of telling a joke if the tell-ee doesn’t get it?)

Before continuing, let’s make one quick excursion down a tangential rabbit hole. I’ll leave a few bread crumbs (since this is a rabbit hole, not a Minotaur’s maze, let’s make the crumbs laser pitons or something). How do features work? How do they “resonate”? Here’s my read, in part; I call it the collapse of fungibility. To a cat, sparrows are fungible—one bird is about as good as another—until it comes time to sink some teeth into one’s little head. Then there is a very specific sparrow: Fungibility collapses. An amino acid molecule is just another amino acid molecule until a specific one is needed, and available, to build that protein molecule. So, it’s fungibles all the way down, but at some point, and that point depends on the detector software and hardware, we run out of resolution, so the collapse “fuzzes out”. [Mental rabbit warrens have many sub-tunnels. Here’s an interesting one, marked “Decoherence”, but I’m out of pitons, and with tunnels all the way down….]

Being plastic, metaphors can cover a lot of territory. But the more they are stretched, the thinner their coverage, which is to say, holes develop and the topology changes, and the more brain-punny even the best metaphors become. Consider the phrase,“non-critical tree-hugging mysticism”: The phrase covers far more ground than it really can without becoming a true brain pun. What about all those empty-headed politicians? [Yeah, I realize that this is a brain pun as well. Politicians, as a class, are usually not empty headed, only thick headed.] Terms like: “Bleeding heart (or knee-jerk) liberals”, “tin-horn dictators” “blondes”, “effete intellectual snobs”, and all the rest that attain cliché status are, I contend, malignant brain puns—malignant because they take on a life of their own, and are no longer at the service of the original meta-“metaphor-ganism”. (In this sense, I’m calling things like similes and poetic images “benign”—usually, although they have to be watched carefully [In fact, rhetoric makes other, “polyphonic” uses of figures of speech, but let’s not go into that here]. Speaking of constant vigilance, this image isn’t quite right either, as some “growths” evolve into vital organs.) And, worse: In the “hands” of competent charlatans (no, that is not an oxymoron; cf. Hitler, for example), they can metastasize. By way of example, I’m going to betray my own leanings here, but there’s no help for it: The President of my great land discusses “bad science”, by which is meant “science that doesn’t conform to official policy”. The problem is that the usage suggests to a very wide and largely gullible audience that nature works via the same mechanisms as politics, machinations and all, and therefore is obligated to conform to the designs of whomever is in power. (To be sure, I can, and may some day, make a point that science and religion are two sides of a single coin, but that is a much different and, possibly, holier can of worms.) “Bad science” is thus a brain pun at a very high level of abstraction—a fulcrum point that can be used, with a military, economic, or industrial lever, to (almost literally) move the world. (A topologically similar—I think, although this might be a brain pun about brain puns—but very mixed image here is that of latching onto a wild attractor in rodeo-abstraction space, and riding with it even while the geography and topology of space itself buck, duck, bob, and juke madly.)

The metaphor system has been around long enough, though, that it must have come up with some way of detecting and dealing with brain puns before they become malignant, right? Before I speculate about this, let me point out that the physical referents giving rise to my cancer metaphor—animal bodies—can generally rid themselves of malfunctioning cells before they become malignant, so long as their healing systems are in good shape. But once those systems become stressed….

Consider how audio is digitized. It is possible to come up with a reasonable digital representation of an analog signal, simply by detecting voltage levels over time and encoding them in binary form. “Reasonable” is, however, relative. 16 bits per sample (like compact discs) is pretty good; 8 bits (like many computer sounds) is much dodgier. Ignoring the important feature of sampling frequency, we note that the most obvious way to improve the representation is to increase the resolution. Let’s try it. (I have no virtual blackboard handy, so you have to imagine the sketch.) Since audio is detected on a logarithmic dB scale, but voltages are detected linearly, the least significant bits and most significant bits represent the signal differently. At the smallest levels, zero voltage to the first detection point, there is a massive dB shift (dBs are power ratios—in this context, voltage ratios—not absolute values), but at each successive detection points, the ratios get smaller. This means that, at the lowest levels, there is a terrific amount of distortion—inaccuracy. In early digital audio products, this phenomenon was quite obvious and egregious, aurally, especially during reverberation “tails”. Eventually, engineers figured out how to add a linearizing signal, called “dither”. In its simplest incarnation, this is low-level white noise, and it works by transmogrifying the equation’s distortion term into the noise one. (I know that this is a “lie-to-scientists”, but, here, that can’t be helped.)

I’m suggesting that this may be a good conceptual starting point (oh, a couple more examples of how we like to come up with “initial conditions”: “Once upon a time…”, and—the biggest scaffold [or maybe a skyhook] of them all—“In the beginning God created…”) for how to think about the metaphor system’s healing sub-system—and, I truly hope, how to design a tonic for that sub-system. One: Increase the resolution as far as possible. Two: When in doubt, dither. (And, by all means, give those metaphorical “killer T-cells” something useful to do, before they stir up trouble by creating metaphorical lupus or something.) Come to think of it, this is almost exactly the same topology as the lies-to-children metaphor, up to and including the dither, except that lies-to-children assumes that resolution will improve on a “need-to-know” basis: If you go into poetry, say, you never have to learn the physics of rainbows (at least this fits into the popular conception of poets). A photographer needs to know more (at the same time, less about poetry…?), and a meteorologist even more (and even less…?). My conception looks more at the ability-to-know: Unless there really is an operational theory of everything, it’s lies all the way down, of course, but fungibility collapses either when resolution deteriorates, or at some chosen level of abstraction (the “choice” usually depends on the value to the organism, given its experience level).

I can think of at least three physical-mental realizations of “dither”—that is, randomness or quasi-randomness as seen by the abstracting mechanisms. One is the neural one of REM sleep. (Another neural “randomizer” has been postulated: a kind of rapid switch, allowing different hemispheres [or “demons”, or whatever] dominance for a brief period of time. “Bipolar” abnormalities are, in this view, described as a realization of that putative switch sticking on one position for a long period.) A second is a temporal one: the unpredictability of events. [Another sub-tunnel worth exploring some day: “Is time quantum?”] The third is the quantum nature of reality, both in the physical sense, and in an abstractional one. At the lowest levels of abstraction, perceived reality seems to “shimmer” and “foam”, to wink in and out of existence. If you try to pin down a feature at such low levels…it’s not there. The very act of looking has sent the feature off on some Brownian-like dance across feature space. Uncertainty sets in. [Yet another sub-tunnel, or maybe it’s a wormhole through wormhole space: “For extra credit, discuss: Complementarity—does this metaphor retain its topology at all levels of abstractional magnification?”]

So, this is my pathology report, short version. Without exposition, I’ll introduce one more point for further musing: Notice that, without dither, the “edge of resolution” is decidedly fractal. But life appears to work best when it is close to, but somewhat south of, the edge of chaos….

Algorithms and the Strange Attractions of the Big Kahuna

Thu, 23 Jan 2003 13:16:32 -0800

“Non-algorithmic computing” is an up and coming thing these days, and has much to do with non-linear ways to describe life, the universe, and everything.

It makes sense for computer scientists to think about modeling biological processes (including emergent processes, such as evolution, and, probably, how the brain is designed and used) in an algorithmic context. After all, that is their professional specialty. However, there are no guarantees that nature “computes” anything like how IBM (for instance) would do it. In fact, I suggest that nature must work somewhat differently, for the following reason.

The modeling proposals—genetic algorithms, evolutionary computations, neural net emulations, and so on—of scientists like John Holland and Stephen Wolfram are beautiful and elegant. And, I believe, they can shed much light on how natural processes work. But they cannot be a complete answer. This is because they are written with the programmer as “God”. That is, they are rule-based, with the rules provided by the author of the program. Now, perhaps natural processes are, at the very bottom, rule-based as well (…and…just who, or what, made the rules?). But there are crucial differences. In evolution, for instance, the rules are not a given, but are a historical document of what has worked in the past. (This is probably true with human “cultural” learning as well, although there are undoubtedly “boot processes” that are included in the “firmware”, or as they say, “wetware”.)

So, in any algorithmic model (incidentally, when we use the term “algorithm:, most often, “heuristic” makes more sense: An algorithm implies that there is a fixed way to get the answers we wish, even if it is a hard and tedious process, while a heuristic suggests a somewhat quick and dirty way to get the deed done to a pretty close approximation of what we are seeking) or artificial life program, the constraints are a 1) pre-statable configuration space, and 2) a “theory of everything” provided by the designer. In natural contexts (more to the point, biological ones), however, the configuration space is not pre-statable—the space of all possibles is continually expanding (too fast for any conceivable computation) and evolving—hence the “theory of everything”, even if it truly exists in any meaningful physical way and can be discovered, will not tell us much about how nature plays itself out. In other words, for all practical purposes, biological creature-space is open-ended. In still other words, while a reductionist approach might be useful in a constrained, fully defined system, it quickly becomes intractable for systems where the rules themselves evolve.

(I believe, but I’m not sure that I could prove my contention rigorously, that this implies the following Uncertainty Principle analog: In the phase space of any unbounded dynamical system, it is not possible to know its state attractor at any one point in time. With some finite period of observation, it is possible to identify this attractor, but by that time, the knowledge of it is irrelevant. This is because the original phase space no longer exists. While there are always small eddies in the flow of the universe that living entities can pick up on, with some fuzzy amount of accuracy, to make a living, the big kahuna, the “God attractor”, is forever denied to all observers, including God.)

Are there really “laws of nature”? I side with those few cosmologists (and many biologists) who claim that physical “constants” are not really so constant after all, but have evolved along with everything else in the universe. Granted, they could be now evolving so slowly, relative to human perception, that they may as well be true constants. Yet, the point remains that the universe essentially makes it all up as it goes along: The space (both in the geographical sense and the mathematical one) we live in is unlike the fully constrained environment of computer-based models. (The “natural laws” of the latter may, in fact, evolves as well, but the confined determinism of computer-space is a much different kettle of fish than open-ended determinism [I wonder, is this one way of thinking about “free will”…?].) I am not sure, but I think this is another way of saying that the universe is not nearly so Newtonian as we used to think (and many physicists, engineers, and clockmakers still do…): You can’t, at least with most natural systems, argue both the facts from the laws and the laws from the facts. The tautology of the equation may have its limitations, both theoretical and practical.

How can we provide a simulation of open-ended “natural” algorithmic processes? I think the basic issue here is that, for biological creatures, “information” is stored almost completely in context, and, for humans, that context is largely cultural. By way of example, consider the following statement: “If Mom doesn’t call, pick her up at the airport at 4:00.” In this case, the “official” exchange of zero bits of information sets off a large complex of physical activity. The processors (brains, in particular—at least for most animals) keep, in local memory, relatively small amounts, which are essentially evolved sub-routines to guide the organism in its interactions with the Wide World “out there”. For computers, on the other hand, the context is all internal, or provided by “God”.

This need not be completely true, of course: Computers can be provided with “sense organs” and “motivation” to seek knowledge. We can, for instance, allow the computer access to large, open-ended databases, such as the Web. With the right search engine and information abstractor, the computer model can increase its knowledge of the world out there by a huge amount. Still, all the databases in the world are just a tiny fraction of the context available to biological creatures. And it’s still, at any one time, finite. What we want, I believe, if computer models are to provide truly useful emulations, is to allow their spaces of all possibles to evolve, as they do for biological entities.

But what kinds of “algorithms” and systems can we come up with to explore continuously fluctuating possibility-spaces? In a sense, we may be part way there already. The “God” mentioned above is only the (top-down) software deity. In the entire system’s pantheon is a second major god who constrains the software: the (bottom-up) rules necessitated by the computer’s physical design, promulgated by a (top-down) human designer. Then there is a meta-god: the gate-keeper who decides which software is allowed to run on the computer, and when. So, we have, in effect, coupled the bounded determinism of the software space to the bounded determinism of the hardware space to the unbounded “determinism” of designer space, programmer space and operator space. This potentially leads, I’m pretty sure, to a kind of super-chaos, or “intractable determinism”.

Still, this isn’t quite the same thing as an evolving space of all possibles in the fully human sense, so I think there is plenty of room to develop some meta algorithms based on giving, god-like (i.e., top-down), computer systems the (bottom-up) keys to at least part of the universe.

I've Never Metaphor I Haven't Liked

Wed, 25 Sep 2002 15:17:12 -0700

[In Investigations, Stuart Kauffman develops his concept of auto-catalytic molecular sets. It occurs to me that this metaphor may be extendable: Idea systems can be autocatalytic too. Why? How do metaphors work? Here are some of my early musings in this regard. Okay, I suppose I did get carried away exercising and contorting some of my favorite metaphors.….]

From Investigations: “If story is not the stuff of science, yet it is how we get on with making our ever-changing lives, then science, not story, must change….I come, hesitantly, to believe we need both science and story to make sense of [the] universe…”

Whoo-boy. The first thing to say is that I would be much less hesitant to make such an assertion. But, then, I have a first-approximation theoretical framework for why Kauffman’s suggestion should obtain—a tentative way of linking story and science, in (and I mean this both figuratively and literally) an autocatalytic way. Let me try this out: “All life wants to live.” Well, sure; that is definitionally redundant. But why not? Organization is organized also. And, philosophers notwithstanding, organization truly does, in our physical reality, seem to work via self-reference, bootstrapping (autocatalysis), and even tautology. Here is an example from my (professional) world: Asynchronous communication with feedback oscillates. That is, in a feedback system, the waveform from A to B materially affects the waveform from B to C, and thus from C to D…and so on. Not a bad analogy, I think, considering that, metaphorically, this process happens, with the same effect, where higher-order interpersonal communications are concerned, and also with lower-order “machine language” inter-neuronal communication.

…Which conveniently segues to the heart, or maybe the brain, of the matter: metaphor itself. Bluntly, human language is far more and far richer than simply a matter of communicating “know-how” and “know-that”. There is, as Kauffman points out, the matter of semantics. But, I am quite convinced, there is a more amazing story to language than even this. All words are, of course, low- to medium-level metaphors: They represent, or usefully suggest something in physical reality that has importance to the user of those words in such a way that functional or structural parallels can be inferred and engaged. When put into a syntactical environment, such “micro-phors” bootstrap themselves—they are self-referential and self-catalyzing to the point of propagating (more or less via the usual Darwinian methods) sentences, paragraphs, monographs….

But what I am really getting at is this: To be useful to critters such as humans, metaphors can only come from a metaphor generator and abstractor such as the human mind (I won’t bother, at this time, to justify or explain the use of the provocative word “mind”). Yet metaphors profoundly shape the mind. Did the mind invent the metaphor as a tool to aid in its own propagation, or was it the other way around?

Metaphors, too, want to live. In a very real sense, they are autonomous agents. Okay, so they may not directly perform work themselves, in a thermodynamic sense. But neither does a queen bee “work” metabolically—identify, cultivate, and harvest energy—yet she is essential for the propagation of the hive as a whole. Metaphors (metaphorically speaking) have evolved a way to engage physical thermodynamically-abled bodies to generate language in order to propagate themselves, to the benefit of both parties. The complex and complicit relationship of the physical and the non-physical: symbiosis at its most charming.

In the local biosphere known as a person, or the somewhat more extended biosphere of a society (more specifically, a culture), what might be the contribution of a metaphorical organism (and I mean a literal organism—only a metaphorical one, if you get my meaning) be, and what might be the mechanism by which it links its processes to those of the physical body? I admit this all needs some working out, but allow me to speculate:

All creatures great and small, literal or metaphorical, exist in their personal spaces-of-the-possible. As this system—the organism and its personal space—is evidently (using a slightly anthropic argument) a non-equilibrium one, some way of navigating its largely uncharted waters and “here-be-dragons” lands is critical—at least if the organism is going to resist death or capture by unfriendlies long enough to propagate itself. But it is difficult to pre-state even the dimensions involved (they may not be fixed anyway), so the geography is more than a gamble, but, literally, unknowable. But it is not necessarily un-transversable. Consider the journey of a two-dimensional being, Ian Flatt, and his three-dimensional traveling companion, Buddy Maas. They may not be familiar with the whole of the terrain, but they have heard of, and wish to visit, a fine bar on the other side of town. (You have to imagine a folded map, not only representing, but actually being, the metropolis we are talking about.) The trek may take hours for Flatt, as he must follow the surface of the land. Maas, of course, can be on his third one-mint julep by the time Flatt shows up. In effect, Maas took a shortcut. To Flatt, it would have seemed that Maas gone through a wormhole in space—which, in a sense, he has.

Dimensionally speaking, we live in many layers of abstraction simultaneously. It is true, of course, that we are most comfortable dealing with what we “dimensio-centrically” think of as the “macro-world”. And yet, when we really think about it, we are aware of all kinds of abstractional layers (“hierarchies” is a more-or-less adequate synonym). For example, I might, for convenience, think of myself as a complete and self-contained sentient being, but, in my heart of hearts, I know that I am really a “system”, with all kinds of mini- and micro- civilizations (intestinal flora; eukaryotes with various genetic pedigrees; colonies of micro- and metaphors—physical and non-physical, biological and otherwise, with diverse cultures and creeds) “living” within me, all working pretty much in harmony, howbeit (presumably) not knowing much about bigger picture, and that they are made up of even more micro-civilizations. One can cast glances in the other abstractional direction as well. How far? How high is up? Or can autonomous agents of any kind exist, in a quantum fashion, only in abstractionally stable levels? Who knows? Seemingly, who knows and when he knows it all depends on the parsing mechanism.

But we were discussing worms and their holes. [Think of that! “Wormhole”—a cosmological metaphor used to introduce light into a metaphorical tunnel metaphor.] It might be stretching the image a bit, but perhaps not overly (metaphors are naturally elastic things, after all), to think of metaphors as a kind of wormhole—a shortcut through possibility space. (“Aw, be brave,” we can here the metaphor saying. “Use me. Abuse me. Stretch me. I can take it! Consider my canary, ‘Hypothesis’. In this dimensional spelunker’s gallery, his job is to test the air and, if necessary, die in our stead.”) All this has—Darwin would love it, I just know—a adaptaional benefit—a professional one, at least, and perhaps a physical one as well. Complexity begets even more complexity, and, in a very complex possibility system, a well organized, well engineered, and well-funded transportation system is required, lest our ways of making a living become mortally compromised. Language provides this “transportation system”. But language-as-communication is not enough. Symbols and meta-symbols; word-painting and poetic images; rhymes and rhythms; similes and allegories…the narrative story: These are “food” for the metaphor system. They catalyze the counterpoint that serves as the abstractional gradient used in the detection and measurement of the metaphorical energy sources utilized by that system.

Earlier, I alluded to the human parsing mechanism. For whatever reason, humans seem to favor stories with initial and boundary conditions. Proper stories have a beginning, a development of some kind, and a conclusion, with or without coda: “Once upon a time”; “Call me Ishmael”; “They lived happily (or otherwise) ever after”; “The rest is silence”; music up. Anything without form along these lines is somehow less than satisfying—to the metaphorical metabolic system, something like a vegan meal without the full complement of amino acids, I suspect. Even “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship” is taken as a conclusion, rather than evidence of a continuing and continuous story.

This parsing mechanism seems to engage across the abstractional gradient as well as within each level, but, in most people, more the latter than the former. Hence occupational and intellectual specialization. And hence the reductionist science increasingly practiced and increasingly preached since the Enlightenment. I admit to a semi-pejorative stance. But in fairness, I have to admit that reductionist science has been extraordinarily and spectacularly successful in its hour and 15 minutes of fame. I am setting out to build a house; I want its engineering to be completely and conspicuously Newtonian. But, perhaps—just perhaps—reductionsism is coming up to an abstractional cul-de-sac in the space of the possible. Such things do happen—hence the need for paradigm shifts. Now, when the paradigm commandos have us boxed in, ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa, and my regiment needs to blast a tunnel out of a dimensional dead-end, I would greatly prefer The Old Man to be a renaissance kind of guy—one whose parsing mechanism is equipped to get us through wormholes—rather than an abstractionally fixated staff bureaucrat.

That is the Whence. The Why We Need It of non-reductionist science is best parsed into another chapter….

The Rime of the Aged May-winterer

Sun, 15 Sep 2002 22:45:14 -0700

The accompanying PDF is a copy of a birthday tribute for a friend as he turned 40. (Three guesses what the actual gift was.) The Great Hoar has caught us both upside the head since, though me more than him.

(The snapshot, however, is of my son, Stephen, relative to whom my beard is decidedly more salt and less pepper. Yet time marches on, and trods on us all, amateur mariners not excepted.)

Soundscapes

Fri, 30 Mar 2001 23:39:24 -0800

This is one of the oldest documents I have readily available—earlier writings are mostly on 5.25 inch floppy discs, if you can believe such antiquity. A major problem for archivists and other historians is how to access old formats. For most of the rest of us, we just have to let them go. This piece was originally a conference demonstration/presentation (in Vienna) wherein I lay out much of my own philosophy of audio and acoustics in contexts that are of interests to life in the big “picture” and their representations in recordings. For the demonstration, I had prepared a large set of examples, including but not limited to those referred to in the text. Naturally (by which I mean “narrationally stereotypically”), I had spent the entire night before departure at this enterprise. With a flight to catch early in the morning, I had no time to make a back-up copy, and…you know the rest. As it all too often happens at such events, the conference staff lost my tape. But you move on to other things.