Prospero's Books

Deeper and ineffable connectedness

Another evocative paragraph from this week's U.S. News and World Report cover story by Jay Tolson:

Galin [David Galin, neuropsychiatrist at UC-San Francisco] proposes that rehabilitating the notion of spirit may be the best way to a new understanding of the self in a post-dualist age. The experience of spirit, he argues, is itself part of the human capacity to experience implicit organization, hidden order, deeper and ineffable connectedness in what we see or otherwise encounter, whether a magnificent work of architecture like Notre Dame or a spectacular vista such as the Grand Canyon. Experiencing spirit is finding unity and wholeness in something, and Galin suggests that we view the self as spirit in that sense: the organization—or even the emergent property—of all of a person's subsystems, not just one more subsystem.

More than the sum of its parts

This week's U.S. News & World Report has a fascinating cover story, by Jay Tolson, on science and the "soul," although that word seems to be used interchangeably with "spirit" or "mind." The concluding sections report on proposals to see mind as an emergent property of the complex system that is a human being. One especially interesting paragraph reports on the role of language in this emergence:

In thinking about a phenomenon like consciousness, many today argue that it might be useful to move beyond the hierarchical model of causality and consider whether causality moves in both directions, up and down, between different levels of complex systems or organizations. It might be useful also to think of the mind as what philosopher Philip Clayton, a professor at Claremont Graduate University, calls an emergent property, a complex system that is more than the sum of its parts and that has effects on the systems that support it. One of the things that distinguish the "moreness" of mind, according to Clayton (and Stapp would agree), is its unique ability to represent, know, and interpret the objects of its own awareness, an ability that makes it possible for a human being to make decisions and initiate actions and not just to be acted upon, or determined, by a lengthy chain of survival-related factors. This is not to say that the mind is not strongly concerned with, or shaped by, the exigencies of survival. But for Clayton, the mind is more than the sum of the parts that support it because it is a semantic machine and not just the elaborately embodied computer, or syntactical machine, that Dennett says it is. It is not, in other words, a machine that merely responds to external stimuli or underlying physical factors that subserve it. Mind—at least higher-order consciousness—is, by this reasoning, very much involved in creating meaning, largely if not entirely through its ability to assert the existence of things through language.

(You may want to look at some of my earlier posts on emergence.)

The animism of the alphabet

Scott London has posted a fascinating interview with David Abram, writer, environmentalist, and magician. One of Abram's observations:

Everything that we speak of as Western civilization we could speak of as alphabetic civilization. We are the culture of the alphabet, and the alphabet itself could be seen as a very potent form of magic. You know, we open up the newspaper in the morning and we focus our eyes on these little inert bits of ink on the page, and we immediately hear voices and we see visions and we experience conversations happening in other places and times. That is magic!

It's outrageous: as soon as we look at these printed letters on the page we see what they say. They speak to us. That is not so different from a Hopi elder stepping out of her pueblo and focusing her eyes on a stone and hearing the stone speak. Or a Lakota man stepping out and seeing a spider crawling up a tree and focusing his eyes on that spider and hearing himself addressed by that spider. We do just the same thing, but we do it with our own written marks on the page. We look at them, and they speak to us. It's an intensely concentrated form of animism. But it's animism nonetheless, as outrageous as a talking stone.

In fact, it's such an intense form of animism that it has effectively eclipsed all of the other forms of animistic participation in which we used to engage — with leaves, with stones, with winds. But it is still a form of magic.

(Thanks to Tim at Pop Occulture for the reference.)

The mystery of Hiram Abiff

When I received my Master Mason degree yesterday, the central part of the ritual concerned Hiram Abiff, the "widow's son," the legendary master builder of King Solomon's Temple who chooses death over loss of integrity.

The origins of the legend are unknown; it hasn't been found in written form earlier than the late 17th and early 18th centuries. But the late Conrad Hahn, Executive Secretary of the Masonic Service Association, offered an intriguing theory in his paper "The Importance of the Legend of Hiram Abiff":

Just where did the legend of Hiram come from? No one really knows; scholars have yet to discover its origins and its introduction into Freemasonry. My own scholarly prejudices lead me to believe that it's a re-working of some mediaeval mystery play, whose original may yet be discovered in a private library or the rubbish of an ancient building.

Mystery plays were the most popular form of public entertainment in the Middle Ages. Each guild or trade had its own preferred dramas; most of them were Biblical in origin. They were produced, staged and acted by members of the guild, first in churches, and then in public squares, to which they were banished when the plays became too boisterious and irreverant for the sacerdotal authorities.

These dramas were called mysteries, not because they treated of witches, ghosts, or detectives, but because they were produced by craft guilds or "mysteres," which is variant of the French word "mestaire," a craft or guild. So the plays became known in England as mysteres, or mysteries, because they were produced by "mestaires," or guilds. The expression, "the mysteries of Freemasonry," therefore, originally meant the ritualistic ceremonies, or work of the Lodge.

Theories of the origin of any of Freemasonry's practices must be examined very critically, since the legendary has often been mistaken—or deliberately substituted—for the historical. But Hahn's theory does make some sense. Even if the story of Hiram Abiff is taken as an 18th-century invention, it must certainly have been influenced by the traditions of English drama, traditions that included the mystery plays.

As an English teacher, I've long taught about the mystery plays, especially as precursors to Shakespeare. So for me, an important part of yesterday's experience was the chance to participate in a 300-year-old ritual that may be a direct descendant of those plays.

(Thanks to Ken at On the Level for making Hahn's paper available.)

Spore and the "Long Zoom"

Today's New York Times Magazine has a fascinating article, by Steven Johnson, on the forthcoming computer game Spore. The game will embody what Johnson calls "the Long Zoom," the visual experience of rapid scale-changing that can be found in the use of Google Maps, in the opening shot of the movie Fight Club, or in the on-screen exploration of the Mandelbrot Set.

The game Spore, being developed by Sim City-creator Will Wright, will start players with a single cell and enable them to move through multiple layers of emergence until they have populated a universe. At each level, new factors must be considered; for example, the level of populating a planet will involve, according to Johnson, "the complex dynamics of ecosystems and food webs."

Johnson writes,

It occurred to me as I wandered through the halls of the Spore offices that a troubled school system could probably do far worse than to devote an entire, say, fourth-grade year to playing Spore. The kids would get a valuable perspective on their universe; they would learn technical skills and exercise their imaginations at the same time; they would learn about the responsibility that comes from creating independent life. And no doubt you would have to drag them out of the classrooms at the end of the day.

Water from air

I've written before about the ancient four elements and their significance for modern science. Now, in a kind of alchemy, scientists have learned to extract one of those elements from another, for the end of sustaining human life.

Wired News reports, "A company that developed technology capable of creating water out of thin air nearly anywhere in the world is now under contract to nourish U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq." Although details of the technology are proprietary, a good general explanation can be found in the Wired News story.

A mathematical moon

Last week's Friday Fractal from Karmen at Chaotic Utopia is a mathematically generated full moon.

The real moon is a miracle. But equally miraculous is the human mind, able to discover the numbers behind the fractionally dimensioned geometry of the moon's face.

(A larger image, along with a comparative photograph of nature's moon, is available at Chaotic Utopia.)

The staircase of life

Joseph Campbell's "monomyth" traces the typical jouney of a mythic hero, leaving home to enter an unfamiliar world, there besting opponents or passing tests, and returning home with gifts. In two dimensions this journey can be represented as a circle—as Campbell does in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

But as I pointed out in my recent post, "Lynn, Lynn," the person who returns home is not the same person who left. (Incidentally, for returning expatriates, that fact can lead to significant "reentry shock" that can be more intense than original "culture shock." My wife, Bette, and I sometimes conduct repatriation training to help people deal with reentry.)

Since the monomythic hero is inevitably changed by his or her journey, we might represent that change by having our circle gradually rise into a third dimension, like one circle in a circular staircase. The hero returns to the place he or she left from, but "higher."

Our life is a series of heroic journeys, sometimes taking a day or less (the very word journey, after all, comes from the French for day). So our life can be represented as a helix, as a climb up a circular staircase.

One small step

Neil Armstrong has always maintained that as he placed the first human foot onto the moon, he meant to say—and thought he did say—"One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," a much more meaningful statement than the often quoted "One small step for man . . . ."

Now, according to an Associated Press story on Space.com, a sophisticated voice analysis of NASA tapes provides evidence that Armstrong did indeed include that crucial indefinite article.

For us, as humankind, restoring that missing word is a small step. But it's a giant leap in the lasting symbolism of that moment.

(Thanks to Matthew at Bad Language for the referral.)