Prospero's Books

Edward Lorenz (1917-2008)

Edward Lorenz, father of chaos theory, died recently. Lorenz, a meteorologist, started a revolution by noticing that tiny changes in the values he entered into a weather simulation program could result in huge changes in the resulting "weather." The "butterfly effect" had entered our culture.

The July-August issue of Science & Spirit magazine reports:

Lorenz led a quiet life. And although chaos theory holds as many surprises as quantum mechanics, it lacks the same spookiness and never caused the same passionate debate about its deep meaning.

Or maybe it all traces back to chaos theory's unglamorous roots. In effect, the theory reduced much of science to predicting the weather, and weathermen have never been popular. Lorenz tried to bring his beloved meteorology up to the elite level of physics but instead forced physics and every other science to swallow its pride and accept a little bit of meteorology's humility (13).

May the links of the network shine

I just came across a list of "the solutions to all our problems (guaranteed!)" by Michael Ventura. The list, originally in the March 9, 1990, issue of L.A. Weekly, was reprinted in the July-August 1990 issue of Utne Reader. Three "solutions" strike me as especially appropriate for this blog:

16. Dance. Jesus said, in one of the Gnostic gospels, "He who does not dance does not know what happens."

32. Stop looking for other people to supply the solution. You're the solution. If you're not, there is no solution.

33. Be aware of the Network. We live by a network of connections and links. Your connection to yourself, to your intimates, to your place, to the collective, to the planet, to the Infinite. (Each is a distinct connection.) Equally powerful are the collective's connections to you (not at all the same as yours to it), to groups of intimates, to itself, to the planet, to the Infinite.

All the links or connective points of this network (call them the acupuncture points of our universe) both take and generate energy. Any link out of sync weakens the others. (The West, for instance, has concentrated too much on the individual, the East, too much on the collective; both approaches have been catastrophic on every level of the network.) This network, from you all the way to the Infinite, is a living whole, ceaselessly changing. Some of these changes take millions of years. Some happen instantaneously.

May the links of the network shine.

We live our lives forward into mystery

Stuart Kauffman, in his new book, Reinventing the Sacred (see What I've Been Reading):

One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures.

Because of this ceaseless creativity, we typically do not and cannot know what will happen. We live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for that is the mandate of life itself. But the fact that we must live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand means that reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives. Reason, the center of the Enlightenment, is but one of the evolved, fully human means we use to live our lives. Reason itself has finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must therefore reunite our full humanity (xi-xii).

Whither it goes

Chapter One of Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism begins with an epigraph from the Gospel of John:

The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit (iii,8).

The field of chaos theory began with an almost identical observation by Edward Lorenz, that the nonlinear system we call weather is utterly determined yet utterly unpredictable. For the author of John, the Spirit, too, is a nonlinear system, far from equilibrium, on the very edge of chaos.

A twenty-first-century Shakespeare?

Scott Malia, at The Shakespeare Blog, writes:

While Shakespeare appreciation might be near universal among writers, it begs the question of comparison. Who among today’s writers is what might be considered the twenty first century answer to him?

His initial suggestion: TV and film writer Aaron Sorkin--a great candidate. Over at The Shakespeare Teacher, Bill and his readers suggest others.

In my Conversations with Shakespeare course, I lead students through half a dozen of Shakespeare's plays, as well as later works in explicit "conversation" with them: Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Smiley's A Thousand Acres, Cesaire's A Tempest, Gaiman's Sandman treatment of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and others. The course ends with a play that I find the most "Shakespearean" of recent dramas: Tony Kushner's Angels in America. My students always find lots of ways that Angels is in implicit, if not explicit, conversation with the Bard.

So Kushner's my candidate--not in the quantity of his output, but in his almost unique ability (among many others) to give his subjects both cosmic and fractal dimensions. If you haven't read or seen the play, do so (especially the amazing HBO film of it), and see if you agree.

Book of the Year

The second annual Prospero's Books Book of the Year is Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life, by physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies.

A few sentences from the first pages of the book (especially when read alongside this blog's description, at the top left of each page) may suggest why it was chosen:

About 350 years ago, the greatest magician who ever lived finally stumbled on the key to the universe--a cosmic code that would open the floodgates of knowledge. This was Isaac Newton--mystic, theologian, and alchemist--and in spite of his mystical leanings, he did more than anyone to change the age of magic into the age of science . . . .

The word science is derived from the Latin scientia, simply meaning "knowledge." Originally it was just one of many arcane methods used to probe beyond the limitations of our senses in the hope of accessing an unseen reality. The particular brand of "magic" employed by the early scientists involved hitherto unfamiliar and specialized procedures, such as manipulating mathematical symbols on pieces of paper and coaxing matter to behave in strange ways. . . .

The ancients were right: beneath the surface complexity of nature lies a hidden subtext, written a subtle mathematical code. This cosmic code contains contains the secret rules on which the universe runs (4).

(The 2006 Book of the Year was The Museum of Lost Wonder.)

Ultimate and Absolute Mystery

Chet Raymo, whom I often refer to as today's finest science writer, has posted a characteristically thoughtful piece on "A Reality Inscrutable." He begins with a quotation from 19th-century thinker Herbert Spencer (as quoted in turn by Jeremy Campbell):

In the early days of Darwinism, the nineteenth-century scholar Herbert Spencer wrote that religions tend to harbor a secret fear that everything may some day be explained, which suggests they are hiding a residual doubt as to whether God as an Incomprehensible Cause is really as incomprehensible as they supposed. What they must face up to, Spencer said, is that it is only in the assertion of a reality utterly inscrutable that religion can be reconciled with science. "A permanent peace between science and religion," he said, "will be reached when science becomes fully convinced that its explanations are proximate and relative, while religion becomes fully convinced that the mystery it contemplates is ultimate and absolute.

Raymo responds:

As Campbell notes, the first of Spencer's two conditions has arguably been met. As we enter the 21st century, I don't know any scientist or philosopher of science who does not admit that scientific knowledge is partial, tentative and subject to change. There is no theory of science so thoroughly entrenched that it would not be overthrown if the evidence demanded it or if a more economical theory came along.

But we are no closer to meeting the second condition than we were in Spencer's time. Indeed, it could be argued that God as Ultimate Mystery is in full retreat. Billions of people right across the planet claim to know God's mind, or claim a personal relationship with the presumed creator of the universe. The God of many churches, mosques and temples is not Ultimate and Absolute Mystery -- to which all of us might reasonably bend our knee in adoration -- but a cross between an avuncular Bill Gates and Michelangelo's po-faced Moses, a God who turns his ear to the congregant's every prayer and asks nothing in return but a generous tithe, or perhaps blowing oneself up in a crowded marketplace.

I agree fully with Raymo. But I would want him to know (as he surely does) that there are many of us religious people, in all faith traditions, who rejoice in the findings of science but who also give the totally inadequate name "God" to the Ultimate and Absolute Mystery--as an inexpressible answer to the unanswerable question "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

Back in May 2006, I quoted Bruce Feiler, author of Where God Was Born, Walking the Bible, and other books:  

Religion . . . breeds overconfidence, and one challenge for today's believers is to rediscover in the fire of faith the source of warmth that can overpower the flames of destruction. This change can only be achieved by fellow believers, I think. The first conviction I took from my journey is that the only force strong enough to take on religious extremism is religious moderation.

Feiler's term "moderation" should not be read as "halfheartedness." Rather, it denotes, for me,

• radical love, acceptance, and respect for all our fellow creatures regardless of their religious faith or lack thereof
• the practice of gratitude, humility, and celebration in the face of the Ultimate and Absolute Mystery

Raymo continues to demonstrate wonderfully that he joins a great many of us people of faith in striving to practice gratitude, humility, and celebration. The outward forms that our gratitude, humility, and celebration take may look different. But that's hardly important.

Skyhooks and cranes

In a review of David Dennett's Consciousness Explained, Chet Raymo employs two brilliant metaphors for two ways of looking at purpose in the universe:

The big question is how we got here. Was our existence foreordained, drawn up as by a skyhook from the dreary world of matter into the realm of angels? Or are we the unforeseen accumulation of blind, chance mutations selected by interaction with the environment, matter lifting itself into ever greater domains of complexity, eventually into consciousness, as if by those cranes used by builders of skyscrapers that ratchet upward as the buildings rise?

After a thoughtful look at both world views, Raymo concludes:

This humble reader is not convinced that we yet know enough about life or mind to commit ourselves solely to cranes or skyhooks. No one who is remotely knowledgeable about science doubts that life and consciousness evolved over billions of years; what is still at issue is how complexity and consciousness arise. Is natural selection enough to drive evolution toward ever more sophisticated systems? Or is there a natural tendency toward complexity and consciousness built into creation from the very beginning, a lawful natural skyhook of sorts that might be accessible to scientific description?  In my mind, the issue is undecided.

Ways that we can all win

President Bill Clinton, in the December 2000 issue of Wired:

Martin Luther King said the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. [It's] sort of a reverse social Darwinism: The more complex societies get and the more complex the networks of interdependence within and beyond community and national borders get, the more people are forced in their own interests to find non-zero-sum solutions. That is, win-win solutions instead of win-lose solutions.... Because we find as our interdependence increases that, on the whole, we do better when other people do better as well - so we have to find ways that we can all win, we have to accommodate each other. And, on balance, that's a humanizing and elevating development.

(Thanks to Pop Occulture and Wikipedia for the link.)

On the surface of mystery

"Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here."

--Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

(Thanks to God's Politics for the quotation.)