Prospero's Books

It's called literature

From John Horgan's response to a letter in the May-June 2008 issue of Science and Spirit:

Many so-called emergent phenomena can be understood, at least partially, through conventional reductionist methods. Particle physics has yielded extraordinary insights into the origin, composition, and evolution of the entire cosmos. Molecular biology has illuminated once opaque mysteries such as conception, heredity, and speciation. But some emergent phenomena, notably that of the human mind, stubbornly resist reductionist analysis. Fortunately we do have a "different methodology" for understanding ourselves. It's called literature (6).

Our breaking and slashing of God

Kester Brewin, at The Complex Christ, has been posting an interesting series of reflections on, among other things, the shift in power that occurs when hunter-gatherer economies are replaced by agricultural economies. From the latest in that series:

Bread is not the simplest thing to make. Leavened, it requires careful control of yeasts, and to make in any quantity, a good supply of grain and a means of controlled heat.

Wine requires more technology still. Large quantities of grapes need to be harvested, and these need proper storage to age and mature.

In other words, the Eucharist as we know it contains hidden within it symbols of our domestication of the earth and its resources and thus, connectedly, symbols of the domination of one life-style - settled food production - over another - hunting and gathering.

Perhaps this is benign, being so long in our history in the making, but I wonder if, in these times when our relationship to the planet is so fragile we might reflect on the Eucharist as a sort of lament for our abuse of the world, just as we might use it to lament for our breaking and slashing of God.

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.)

A myth before the myth

I'm reading Wallace Stevens's long poem "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" with one of my grad students. Here's a passage that has stood out for me:

The clouds preceded us.

There was a muddy centre before we breathed.
There was a myth before the myth began,
Venerable and articulate and complete.

From this the poem springs: that we live in a place
That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.

(Among the categories into which I've put this blog posting are Signs, Systems, and Spirit, but also Emergence. Those tags may help you see some of the things Stevens is saying to me.)

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.

In times of change . . . .

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.” — Eric Hoffer

(Thanks to Donna Woodka at Changing Places for the quote.)

Whence beautiful complexity?

At Gallery of Computation is a gallery of art works, by Jared Tarbell, that are uniquely generated by computer programs as you watch. They are stunning examples of a new level of artistic creation in which the artist does not create just one instance of beauty but instead creates a generative program that can produce infinite instances of beauty.

The fact that the each piece of artwork emerges from very simple rules makes the artist not less significant but more significant: not every set of simple rules produces something interesting, not to mention beautiful. If we glory in the infinitely complex beauty of Tarbell's work, how much more should we glory in the infinitely complex beauty of our universe, from subatomic particles, to us, to galaxies.

Whether we posit a creator behind that beautiful complexity (Freemasons refer to "the Great Architect of the Universe"), posit (with Tillich) a "ground of being" from which complex beauty can arise, or posit our universe as one particularly interesting instance among an infinite number of existing universes, the fact of our existence and the existence of beauty around us is surely worthy of adoration and gratitude.

(To see Tarbell's works, go to the Gallery of Computation. As words appear in the white space, try moving your cursor among them, clicking on them if you wish. Or click on "Thumbnail Gallery" to see a visual index. When you see a work you like, click on it. When you arrive at its page, you'll see a large static image of just one manifestation of the work. But don't stop there. Click on "Small," "Medium," or "Large" below the image and watch a unique art object evolve. Experiment with the sizes to learn which work best on your computer.)

(Thanks to Seed magazine for the lead.)

Would they want to?

At Cognitive Daily, Dave Munger has posted an interesting article that begins with a question from Christine Kenneally's book The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language:

If we shipwrecked a boatload of babies on the Galapagos Islands—assuming they had all the food, water, and shelter they needed to survive—would they produce language in any form when they grew up? And if it did, how many individuals would you need for it to take off, what form might it take, and how would it change over the generations?

After discussing how others have answered that question, Munger asks one of his own:

I've often wondered how long it would take a small group (say, 50) of humans to recreate modern society. Would 50 average individuals have enough knowledge to rebuild modern technology in a generation? Would they want to?

Trying to teach that she was one

In The Elixir and the Stone (see What I've Been Reading), Baigent and Leigh quote at length from the  novelist Thomas Mann as a twentieth-century artist influenced by Hermeticism. Because I am fascinated by unity of the cosmos, and by the fractals and other patterns that occur throughout art and nature, at all scales, I was struck by this passage from Mann's Felix Krull:

The interdependent whirling and circling, this convolution of gases into heavenly bodies, this burning, flaming, freezing, exploding, pulverizing, this plunging and spreading, bred out of Nothingness and awaking Nothingness--which would perhaps have preferred to remain asleep and was waiting to fall asleep again--all this was Being, known also as Nature, and everywhere in everything it was one. I was not to doubt that all Being, Nature itself, constituted a unitary system from the simplest inorganic element to Life at its  liveliest, to the woman with the shapely arm and to the figure of Hermes. Our human brain, our flesh and bones, these were mosaics made up of the same elementary particles as stars and star dust and the dark clouds hanging in the frigid wastes of interstellar space. Life, which had been called forth from Being, just as Being had been from Nothingness--Life, this fine flower of Being--consisted of the same raw material as inanimate Nature. It had nothing new to show that belonged to it alone. One could not even say it was unambiguously distinguishable from simple Being. The boundary line between it and the inanimate world was indistinct. Plant cells aided by sunlight possessed the power of transforming the raw materials of the mineral kingdom so that it came to life in them. Thus the spontaneous generative power of the green leaf provided an example of the emergence of the organic from the inorganic. Nor was the opposite process lacking, as in the formation of stones from silicic acid of animal origin. Future cliffs were composed in the depths of the sea out of the skeletons of tiny creatures. In the crystallization of liquids with the illusory appearance of life, Nature was quite evidently playfully crossing the line from one domain into the other. Always when Nature produced the deceptive appearance of the organic in the inorganic--in sulphur flowers, for instance, or ice ferns--she was trying to teach that she was one (Baigent and Leigh 314-15).

A largely ceremonial explanation

I'm finally reading a clipping from the January 2000 issue of Harper's, an extract from David Berlinski's The Advent of the Algorithm. I had clipped it because his earlier book on the calculus had helped me better understand that subject (no small feat, considering that, astonishingly, no math was required of liberal arts majors at my undergraduate university in the 1960s). One paragraph from the Harper's excerpt has especially caught my attention:

The complexity of human artifacts, the things that human beings make, finds its explanation in human intelligence. The intelligence responsible for the construction of complex artifacts--watches, computers, military campaigns, federal budgets, this very essay--finds its explanation in biology. Yet however invigorating it is to see the algorithmic pattern appear and reappear, especially on the molecular biological level, it is important to remember, if only because it is so often forgotten, that in very large measure we have no idea how the pattern is amplified. Yet the explanation of complexity that biology affords is largely ceremonial. At the very heart of molecular biology, a great mystery is vividly in evidence, as these symbolic forms bring an organism into existence, control its morphology and development, and slip a copy of themselves into the future (19-20).